More than deep fakes, shallow fakes should worry everyone

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Context

More than deep fakes, shallow fakes should be a worrying factor in upcoming elections.

Shallow fakes

Shallow fakes or cheap fakes are pictures, videos, and voice clips created without the help of AI technology but by either editing or by using other simple software tools.
Shallow fake videos are manually altered or selectively edited.
They can be created easily, in some cases it can be just a clipped video being shared without any context.

Examples of shallow fakes:

The war has begun with political parties’ social media handles sharing shallow fakes to mock their rivals. One such shallow fake was recently shared on the Congress’s official X handle. The party took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a morphed image where he was seen standing in front of a picture frame featuring wrestler Vinesh Phogat in tears.

What is the difference between deepfakes and shallowfakes?

Deepfakes	Shallow fakes
Deepfakes describe photorealistic and audio-realistic images, video, and audio created or manipulated with artificial intelligence to deceive.	Shallow fakes or cheap fakes are made with existing technologies—for example, a conventional edit on a photo, or slowing down a video to change the speech patterns of an individual, or more often rely on miss-captioning or mis-contextualizing an existing image or video, claiming it is from a time or place which it is not from. For example, you might use an image from last year of a protest from one state around land rights, and present it as a protest from yesterday in another location.”
Deepfakes use artificial intelligence to generate fabricated images	Whereas shallow fakes rely less on complex editing techniques and more on connecting partial truths to small lies.
The deep fakes can appear highly realistic and create often indistinguishable counterfeit content.	The manual nature of shallow Fakes often results in less convincing alterations.
It is less accessible than shallow fakes.	Shallow fakes being less technologically intensive, are more accessible to the average person, allowing for widespread use compared to deepfakes which use AI and ML.

Most misinformation involves reconfiguration( Shallow fakes): A case point

A study conducted early in the pandemic by the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University found that 59 percent of the misinformation involved various forms of reconfiguration, where existing and often true information is spun, twisted, recontextualized, or reworked.
“Less misinformation (38%) was completely fabricated. Despite a great deal of recent concern, we find no examples of deep fakes in our sample. Instead, the manipulated content includes ‘cheap fakes’ produced using much simpler tools. The reconfigured misinformation accounts for 87% of social media interactions in the sample; the fabricated content, for 12%.”

Conclusion

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2024, India ranks first in facing the risk of misinformation and disinformation.
Chief Election Commissioner has acknowledged that addressing misinformation in the digital age presents a complex challenge and advised political parties to demonstrate responsible behavior, thereby underscoring the looming threat of misinformation.

Source:

PRACTICE QUESTION

Q. Consider the following statements about Shallow fakes :

1. Shallow fakes or cheap fakes are pictures, videos, and voice clips created without the help of AI technology.

2. It as opposed to the deep fakes can appear highly realistic and create often indistinguishable counterfeit content.

3. Shallow fakes being less technologically intensive, are more accessible to the average person

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

A. Only One

B. Only Two

C. All Three

D. None