Elon Musk’s X cracks down on deepfakes

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, on Saturday, said that a new update on “improved image matching” will defeat deepfakes as well as shallowfakes on social media platform X.

The new update will show notes on 30 per cent more posts that contain “similar or identical images.”

“We just rolled out the update and will be monitoring for any erroneous image matches,” X said in a post.

Elon Musk added that this move “should make a big difference in defeating deepfakes (and shallowfakes).”

Shallowfakes are photos, videos and voice clips generated without the help of artificial intelligence (AI), and use widely available editing and software tools.

X notes on images automatically show on posts that contain a matching image.

“It’s common for these notes to match on dozens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of posts. Now, you can see how many posts an image note is matching on, right in note details,” according to the company.

In the global election season, experts have warned about the spread of fake news and deepfakes that aim to interfere with polls.

The independent Oversight Board which has 22 global human rights and freedom of expression experts from across the globe, has called for urgent action to tackle deepfakes threatening global elections.

Deepfakes (portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake” are synthetic media that have been digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness convincingly with that of another. It can also refer to computer-generated images of human subjects that do not exist in real life. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage tools and techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence, including facial recognition algorithms and artificial neural networks such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs). In turn the field of image forensics develops techniques to detect manipulated images.

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