In this session of the Institute for People and Technology’s (IPaT) Think-Tank series, we will be facilitating a discussion about the multidisciplinary effort to understand and mitigate the potential for the misinformative use of deepfake videos. Deepfakes are videos in which the (usually human) subject of a video has been digitally altered to appear to do or say something that they never actually did or said. Sometimes these manipulations produce innocuous novelties (e.g., testing what it would look like if Keanu Reeves had played “The Narrator” in the film Fight Club), but far more dangerous use cases have been observed (e.g., generating fake footage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he instructs Ukrainian military forces to surrender to their Russian opponents). We will present our research group’s previous and ongoing efforts in this area, which we hope will inspire discussion about remaining questions/challenges and how they can be addressed by multidisciplinary research teams. Our work thus far has mostly been approached from a psychological perspective, but we believe that many of the disciplines represented in IPaT have a significant role to play in these efforts, and anticipate a fruitful think-tank session.

Facilitated by Zack Tidler, graduate student; Richard Catrambone, Professor of Psychology and John Stasko, Regents Professor, School of Interactive Computing