Courtesy of makeuseof

The Term Deepfakes

Last year, a new type of “synthetic media” took the world by a storm, when a video of Barack Obama calling President Trump a “total and complete dipshit” circulated the web.The video was released on Buzzfeed youtube channel in collaboration with film director Jordan Peele to raise awareness on this new type of media, and its ability to distort reality. Supported by the fairly new Artificial Intelligence technologies, Deepfakes is a new type of media ( mainly Videos) that could be the next major challenge for information verification, and of course a serious threat to news.

It all started back in 2016, when some Reddit users started creating videos where they swapped the faces of celebrities with porn stars, making a fairly believable claims that these celebrities are actually in porn movies. The term deepfakes was also generated by a Reddit user, but has been officially used to describe the AI editing technology worldwide. With the right tools these editing software can either sync people mouths with another person’s speech or change their movement to turn them into great dancers.  

The Different Techniques of Deepfakes

Deepfakes are definitely more than just lip syncing and fun face swaps, there are different techniques to create deepfakes, and it does require technical  knowledge.

Face Swap: The most popular form of deepfakes where an algorithm implant a person’s face into a video. Usually used to put a person’s face into actors bodies into movies, placing them in situations and places where they have never been.

Facial Reenactment: Through this techniques video forgers can transfer the facial expression for one person to another. Individuals can play with expression making the targeted person on video look weird, disgusted, angry, surprised…etc.

Lip Sync: Using this technique video forgers can embed someone’s mouth to another’s face on a target video. When combined with audio, people will appear in the video saying thing which they didn’t, like what happened in the Obama video

Motion Transfer: Video creators and researchers figured how to transfer the body movements from one person to another creating a completely different figure movement on video. For examples they have captured the motion of a certain dancer and transferred it to a another person with zero dancing skills making them seem like professionals.

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley, and WSJ correspondent Jason Bellini used Motion Transfer to give him the dance moves of  Bruno Mars.

How to Identify Deepfakes

Different media organizations are working on new tools that will enable them to detect deepfakes fast, in order to avoid any kind of misinformation. One way of detecting deepfakes is to check if the footage has been altered by closely looking at the frames of the videos to inspect abnormal elements. Another way is to go the traditional route and ask sources and subjects directly to get their confirmation first. Another way to detect deepfakes is to use the reverse image method, to check for old versions of the footage. Some search engine offer tools to do Reverse image search like Google Image Search and Tineye. It is advised to also use editing softwares like final cut to check for glitches and unnatural additions to the videos.

Unnatural chin movement

“We know deepfakes and other image manipulations are effective — this kind of fakery can have immediate repercussions,” said Roy Azoulay, founder and CEO of Serelay, a platform that enables publishers to protect their content against forgeries.

Life Threatening or Life Saving Technology

Deepfakes are precariously believable and there’s no doubt that they represent a risk to the media industry if not to the whole society. A  video showing soldiers committing war crimes or politicians saying the wrong things could literally start a war. However, that does not negate the technology’s many advantages if used for the right reasons. Deepfakes can be used in the entertainment production division to considerably lower the cost of filmmaking and gaming manufacture as well.

GANs (Generative adversarial networks) the technology that gave birth to deepfakes, and Machine Learning holds great potential in enhancing self-driving cars, helping them recognize elements like bicycles and pedestrians in great precision. This also helps voice activated devices like google assistant, Alexa, and Siri in their conversational abilities.

Although GANs created many possibilities, deepfakes being one of them, which threatens the lives of many, it can also be used in saving them. GANs can generate quiet realistic images of brains with Alzheimer’s disease and others with tumors. The resulting images will be used to train algorithm to identify tumors in new images.

Actual MRI images and synthetic versions generated by a GAN — Shin et al

If you would like to know more about Video Analysis using the latest AI technologies contact us at Insideout10 to learn more about our products and activities. 

Expected to hit the market by 2020, 5G or fifth generation wireless is the upcoming and much anticipated mobile technology replacing the present 4G/LTE wireless networking. Experts anticipate the number of 5G connections to reach 20 to 100 million connections by 2021. The expenditure on 5G infrastructure is forecasted to reach around 2.3 billion dollars for 2021. One justification for the large amount of money is that 5G infrastructure actually differs than usual 4G/LTE networks. 5G networks needs a far bigger number of access points, since it depends on millimeter-wave signals that can’t travel far distances like what we utilize for 4G networks.

What is 5G and how does it work?

5G is definitely more than just faster downloading speed. With this technology high definition media streaming will become more attainable in highly populated areas and places where people cannot reach WiFi hotspots. 5G is expected to be a main contributor in many industries, for instance, in environmental industries, 5G makes remote monitoring possible, which in turn supports “environmental integrity, food scarcity, and ensures clean water.”

The reason why many industries are willing to spend vast amounts of money on this new technology is that it can get your internet speed up to 10 GB per second, that is “600 times faster than the traditional 4G speed.” to give you more perspective, 5G speed allows you to download a 4k movie in only a few seconds.

How Can 5G Change Online & Mobile Marketing?

For business and beyond faster mobile phones, specifically when complemented with artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud computing technologies, 5G will stimulate business and transformations in smart societies with the help of large number of connected devices.

Five Reasons Why You Should Use Artificial Intelligence Powered Marketing

For marketers and online business the benefits could be unlimited. Using 5G, different forms of content will travel from screen to screen between customers and brands and uninterruptedly amongst customers themselves at unprecedented fast speed. Marketers will be more able to implement many strategies like using AR and VR technologies, more interactive gaming experiences plus a new level of customization and personalization for their customers.

5G will increase accuracy in technologies such as GPS and context driving data. Connected to loT devices that will appear in the global market in a few years, 5G will pave the way for innovations in products and services, equivalent to how 4G brought about Google Maps, and Uber. Also on the customer’s side, data should get cheaper, and accordingly some expect the business models of payments and data costs to change.

How Can VR/AR Successfully Change Online Marketing

5G supported phones are expected to be released early this year, as smartphone models from brands like Samsung and Huawei are set the hit the market soon for all the early adopters interested in this technology. Apple, alternatively is not going to offer 5G backed iPhones before 2020 or 2021.

Samsung Galaxy 10, 5G smartphone (expected model) — cnet.com

With these new capabilities it is time for marketers to roll up their sleeves and think of ways to integrate 5G technologies into their work. Many of the traditional marketing constraints and troubleshoots can now be solved using the new competencies offered by this new addition. From integrating AI in marketing activities to AR/VR advertising and accurate testing results, with fifth generation wireless networking the sky’s the limit.

If you are looking to advance your online & mobile marketing techniques using Artificial Intelligence and the latest media streaming technologies, contact Insideout 10 today to learn more about our offers for digital branding and media delivery. 

Courtesy of scmp.com

In its January 2019 report, Reuters Institute Digital Media Survey revealed that media publishers are planning to invest more in AI in the next year. This is in an effort to exploit the potential of AI and machine learning to create better news results, but not on the expenses of editors and journalists, said Nic Newman, Senior research Associate. In this article, we’ll present you three ways in which publishers will integrate AI in 2019.

Big Data Analyzer

The huge amount of daily data entry for journalists to analyze and verify has become more and more beyond their daily capabilities. Therefore, it is now a necessity for journalists to use algorithms. DataMinr for example, used algorithms to check hundreds of tweets that helped them to keep track of important breaking news items. AP has used AI to come up with an internal verification tool that assists journalist in verifying news in real time. Reuters on the other hand, is using AI to help journalists analyze big data and recommend ideas for news stories, or even help journalists write part of the stories, but not to replace reports.

Reuters News Tracer demo — Thomson Reuters

Search Engine Optimizer

AI can help media publishers and websites by sorting analytics to detect content, which is producing the top on page results. AI can also categorize themes and subject that encourage website visitors to keep returning to the website. For example Wordlift uses machine learning for SEO and has helped many businesses grow their website visitors using AI technologies. With the help of AI they were able to re- designed how content is organized by using the entity-based content models for Windowsreport, and improve content organization and SEO for Freeyork magazine.

Robotic News Anchors

News agencies have been using automated news stories in different capacities for years now, but what the next step might be, is virtual news anchors. Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency has revealed their first robotic news anchor last year. The robotic anchor movements, voice and appearance is based on a real presenter who works at Xinhua. The virtual anchor can speak English and Mandarin, but lacks warmth and sense of humor, which Xinhua claims that they can eventually programme these specification in it. Experts in the field have shared their ethical concerns in regard to the integration of AI anchors into newsrooms in the future. With the technological advancements of AI, we might witness a solution to all public concerns and a real application of AI anchors in news presenting, if not in 2019 may be in just a few years.

Machine Learning News

One impressive application of machine learning technologies in news is the Chinese app Jinri Toutiao or (Today’s Headlines). Toutiao and Kuaibao are the current global leaders of AI news, mainly using Machine Learning to send personalized news stories to users. Touitou’s has around 120 million users, with an average engagement time of an hour daily. Although AI apps are spreading fast across Asia with Newsdog in India and similar apps in Indonesia, it is important to be aware of the dangers of “popularity based algorithms.”

Toutiao App — Photo by Mike Sullivan

BBC is also building Machine Learning applications for public service in 2019. BBC believe these applications are “Responsible Machine Learning in the Public Interest,” but this means first and foremost educating people about how to use algorithms and AI for their benefits to avoid undesirable consequences.

Top Four Digital News Predictions of 2019 

Despite promising potentials, experts are still skeptical about AI and continue to share their concerns regarding what is considered AI, how can it be regulated, when to be used and incorporated into the society.  Theses doubts might be formed by the media coverage of the AI topic. Based on a recent study by RISJ (Reuters Institute) which analyzed 760 articles that referenced AI in UK media, 33% of the articles based their information on industry sources (CEOs and Executives), that is six times more than articles which actually referenced academia or the government.The report also declared that news outlets “politicize” opinions about AI. Right-wing outlets focus on geopolitics and economics, while Left-wing outlets focus on the ethical side of AI like algorithm bias and discrimination.

Perhaps in 2019, alternative opinions of scientists and activists can provide more insight about the advantages and smart capabilities of AI in an attempt that might change the view of AI/ML as disruptive technologies.

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