Deepfakes & Disinfo 101: Reading List

Deepfakes and disinformation-- two words that seem to be most often paired with dystopia. How should a business executive responsible for protecting an organization, a brand or a product learn more about them and what to do to fight them? 

Mainstream media, academia and civil society have all contributed to the dialogue to frame the problem of deepfakes and disinformation. DeepTrust Alliance would like to share the resources that have been most helpful for introducing people to the topic. As with many societal problems, there is significant nuance and complexity at each layer of the issue. Therefore, it is critical to achieve a common understanding of the problem before deepfakes and disinformation upend democracy, accelerate fraud, and destroy public trust.  

Below you will find a short list from a range of sources meant to give a general introduction. We have listed both academic and general knowledge pieces. Academic pieces are generally written for a specialist audience which is strongly oriented towards technical and policy research. Even if the level of technical detail is too much, often the introductory explanations provide important insight into how this technology is being developed. 

For a more general audience, we have included a number of mainstream and technology media pieces that explain the challenges succinctly and clearly for a non-technical audience. We strongly encourage you to watch the videos and check out examples of deepfakes. 

We also recommend reading our reports from the Fix Fake Symposium events which brought together over 150 of the leading experts in disinformation, deepfakes, forensics and media to discuss the solutions needed to overcome these challenges. 

General

• NYTimes: Deepfakes: Is this video even real?

• Washington Post: Seeing isn’t believing

• DeepTrust Alliance: Deepfake, Cheapfake: The Internet’s Next Earthquake

• Brookings: Fighting deepfakes when detection fails

• TEDx: How we can protect truth in the age of disinformation 

Technical/ Academic

• Ian Goodfellow: Generative Adversarial Nets

• Data & Society: Deepfakes and Cheapfakes

• First Draft: Information Disorder: Towards an Interdisciplinary Framework for Policy and Research

• Pawel Korus: A survey of protection and verification techniques

• Hao Li: Protecting world leaders against deepfakes

• Yejin Choi: Defending against Fake News

• Nasir Memon: Neural imagine pipelines: The Scourge or hope of forensics? 

Solutions

• MIT Technology Review: Making deepfake tools doesn’t have to be irresponsible. Here’s how.

• Witness: Mal uses of AI Generated Synthetic Media

• WSJ: Tech companies take steps to address deepfakes

Have others you’d recommend? Please add them in the comments or email us at info@deeptrustalliance.com