All posts tagged: Deepfake

Google Quickly Rolls Back a Feature That Could Make Deepfake Satellite Images

Google Quickly Rolls Back a Feature That Could Make Deepfake Satellite Images

Published by skeptic

Google announced a new way to use AI this week. Then pulled it a day later. As of Thursday, you could use the company’s Nano Banana 2 AI model to generate images based on Google Earth’s satellite, aerial and 3D images. After journalists and researchers shared concerns that it could create realistic satellite images that could be used in misinformation campaigns, the company said it was heading back to the drawing board to improve its guardrails. Google initially listed a few ways you can use the new Nano Banana feature in your Google Earth maps, like creating custom infographics to learn about a new place you haven’t visited yet, or reimagine how it looked years ago.  You could even imagine the future, like new infrastructure or your dream home. I tried it out for myself before the feature disappeared. I typed “Central Park” in the Google Earth search bar, zoomed in on the place and tapped the Create Image button. After a brief prompt, I saw my three-story dream home in the middle of Central Park …

Hugging Face Has a Deepfake Nudes Problem

Hugging Face Has a Deepfake Nudes Problem

Published by skeptic

Ever so slowly, the crackdown on harmful sexual deepfakes is taking hold. Over the past few months, US law enforcement officials have seized deepfake hosting websites, while the EU and UK have drawn up plans to ban “nudify” apps by the end of the year. Despite this, large tech companies are still pushing millions in the direction of software that can digitally undress people without their consent. The open-source AI platform Hugging Face—a repository of AI models and datasets, which has been valued in the billions—has a widespread problem with nonconsensual deepfakes, according to a new report published Tuesday by the European nonprofit AI Forensics. Researchers from the group say they tested nine of the top image editing Spaces on Hugging Face, which host models people can directly use on the site, and seven of these easily changed a clothed image of a woman into a topless one. In further testing, AI Forensics researchers created their own honey-pot-style image editing Spaces on Hugging Face—which were designed not to produce any images—and tracked more than 1,000 …

Google’s deepfake detector system used to debunk McConnell hoax pic

Google’s deepfake detector system used to debunk McConnell hoax pic

Published by skeptic

Google’s SynthID system has been used to debunk a high-profile AI-generated hoax image, in a rare but significant win for the system. Earlier this week, a picture circulated online that seemed to show Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell covered in tubes in a hospital bed in a state of extreme distress. The image was shared widely on Reddit and X, but by Wednesday, the revered fact-checking site Snopes had debunked the image, noting that, when checked, the image registers as containing the SynthID watermark designed by Google to identify AI-generated pictures. In short, the watermark worked exactly as it was supposed to in a win for anti-deepfake technology. Senator McConnell’s health has been the subject of intense speculation since he checked into the hospital after an emergency call on June 14. Since that time, he’s been largely absent from the public eye, fueling speculation that his health may be failing. In this case, however, the evidence proved to be entirely fake. Launched at Google’s I/O developer conference in 2025, SynthID works as an invisible signature, visible …

6 Signs Researchers Say Can Help Spot An AI Deepfake Image

6 Signs Researchers Say Can Help Spot An AI Deepfake Image

Published by Sam Flores

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xAI Asks Court to Strip Alleged Grok Deepfake Nudes Victims of Anonymity

xAI Asks Court to Strip Alleged Grok Deepfake Nudes Victims of Anonymity

Published by skeptic

“Factoring out the deepfake image itself—as it will remain under seal—there is nothing inherently stigmatizing about revealing the fact that a deepfake image was created of South Carolina Doe without revealing the image itself,” the lawyers wrote in one of their May 15 filings. “As a result, this case simply does not involve the types of compelling privacy interests traditionally recognized as requiring pseudonymity.” Neither xAI nor lawyers representing the company responded to WIRED’s request for comment about the case. Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who has specialized in tackling digital abuse, says civil cases where people are ordered to sue using their real names can lead to lawsuits being dropped, creating an “unacceptable and unjust” situation. “Forcing plaintiffs in privacy suits to sue in their names does so little for judicial transparency and so much to deter litigation,” Citron tells WIRED. All of the four pseudonyms claimants in the case, according to their legal filings on May 29, would consider dropping out of the proceedings if …

Fieldwork As a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy review – story of a deepfake sex tape | Fiction

Fieldwork As a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy review – story of a deepfake sex tape | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

We can all agree that the internet today, especially two particular platforms owned by the world’s greatest megalomaniacs, is a hellscape. But if you think X and Facebook are purgatories of friendless trolls endlessly posting hate and bullying women, each other and minorities under the guise of free speech, wait till you experience the Indian version of that netherworld, as captured by novelist and poet Meena Kandasamy. Take the worst algorithms in the world, add a billion-and-a-half people, mix in a far-right government with advanced internet skills and bring on the “burning ghats of Indian politics” that include caste and misogyny as well as roiling ethnic and religious antagonisms, and the western version of X begins to look like a children’s playground. This is the world that Amy Chaturvedi, a posh student activist-communist living in London, wakes up to one day when the internet is set ablaze by a deepfake sex tape. It’s her face, but it’s not her. Don’t get her wrong, Amy is sexually unapologetic and proudly experimental; she has done plenty of transgressive …

Americans can’t spot a deepfake, and that’s a business crisis, not just a consumer problem

Americans can’t spot a deepfake, and that’s a business crisis, not just a consumer problem

Published by skeptic

Presented by Veriff Americans can’t reliably distinguish real from AI-generated content, and that’s not just a media literacy problem; it’s a direct threat to how businesses verify identity online. New research finds that while many people are aware of deepfakes, their ability to distinguish them from reality is barely better than a coin flip. A 2026 survey conducted by Veriff and Kantar among 3,000 respondents in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil shows Americans scoring just 0.07 on a scale where 0 represents random guessing. If people can’t distinguish authentic visual content, they can’t reliably distinguish authentic identities. In practice, that means the same users interacting with digital services are often unable to tell whether the person on the other side of a screen is real. That ineffectiveness has direct consequences for every digital business that relies on image- and video-based identity verification to confirm who is on the other side of a screen. That includes everything from customer bank onboarding and account recovery to marketplace seller verification, high-value ecommerce transactions, social platform …

‘South Park’ Creators Bring Deepfake Trump Penis Out on ‘Kimmel’

‘South Park’ Creators Bring Deepfake Trump Penis Out on ‘Kimmel’

Published by Daniella Wilson

In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday, South Park creators and showrunners Trey Parker and Matt Stone produced the prosthetic they used to deepfake Donald Trump’s penis in the season 27 premiere last year and managed to get the host — a longtime foe of the president — to wear it on his pinky finger. Parker and Stone made a good amount of news in their rare television appearance, revealing that season 29 of South Park will premiere on Sept. 16 on Comedy Central. And, discussing the 15th anniversary celebration of The Book of Mormon, Parker said he would be playing Joseph Smith on Broadway with Stone also taking the stage. Parker and Stone are coming off a two-season run of South Park that ended in December and became a cultural milestone as they mercilessly spoofed the Trump administration, creating a ratings bonanza, angering the White House and reinvigorating the show. And, somehow, they got away with it, penis jokes and all. “We hide behind cartoons, Parker joked at the top of the …

Google Makes It Easy to Deepfake Yourself

Google Makes It Easy to Deepfake Yourself

Published by skeptic

One of the most immediately noticeable changes to Flow is the new video-generation model powering the experience: Omni Flash, succeeding Veo. Similar to how Google’s Nano Banana model brought more context about the world into the AI image-creation process, the Omni Flash model overhauls video generation with richer detail throughout clips. Flow users can generate characters in AI videos with more consistency via the Omni Flash model. Roman says this is a major improvement over the weakness in past versions of Flow, where created characters could warp during successive video generations. Also, a key character that Flow users can now generate in an AI scene after an AI scene? Themselves. Users set up an “avatar” of themselves by going into the settings of their Flow account and scanning a QR code on their phone. Then, Google asks users to record themselves saying a string of numbers aloud and move their head around to capture every angle. This selfie-capture style will feel familiar to anyone who signed up for the Sora app, which OpenAI launched last …

The Download: deepfake porn’s stolen bodies and AI sharing private numbers

The Download: deepfake porn’s stolen bodies and AI sharing private numbers

Published by skeptic

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn When Jennifer got a research job in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see whether it would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than a decade earlier. It did, but it also surfaced something she’d never seen before: one of her old videos, now featuring someone else’s face on her body. Conversations about sexualized deepfakes usually focus on the people whose faces are inserted into explicit content without consent. But another group often gets ignored: the people whose bodies those faces are attached to. Adult content creators say AI systems are training on their work, cloning their likenesses, and generating explicit content they never agreed to make, all with little legal protection or control.  Read the full story on the threat to their rights, livelihoods, and ownership of their own …