How Deepfakes can harm your business.
Deepfake attacks may be inevitable, but enterprises can take measures to protect against them or at least, mitigate their impact
Deepfake videos — fake videos created or doctored by AI and machine learning (ML) to look like the real thing — have gone mainstream, including one purporting to show a drunken Nancy Pelosi. There’s been a lot of focus on their implications for politics, entertainment figures and national security. But enterprises need to fear them as well. Experts warn deepfakes could show a CEO announcing false bad news about her company, sinking the stock price and harming the brand. (Earlier this year, a deepfake was released of Mark Zuckerberg bragging about his control of billions of people’s stolen data.) They could be used for extortion — creating a deepfake and threatening to release it unless a ransom was paid. And there are other dangers as well.
In this post, I’ll explain the damage they can do to enterprises, and offer advice on how companies can best combat them.
Andrew B. Gardner, Senior Technical Director and Head of AI/ML for Symantec’s Center for Advanced Machine Learning (CAML) makes no bones about how dangerous deepfakes are for enterprises and society. “Fake content like videos, photos, emails, transactions, etc., are an enormous risk to enterprises and society as a whole,” he says. “In my opinion, this is the most significant risk we must deal with in an AI/ML world: How do you make decisions when you don’t know what is real?”
