AI and facial recognition are dangerous

As I proofread this post, Facebook users are jumping on a new fad. They are posting pictures of themselves 10 years ago and today. They do this to show much they have aged, or have not aged, in 10 years. I think this is dangerous. AI can take these facial images, superimpose your face on an image and then defraud you.

This starts to be more than a bit concerning. The faces in this post (below) look like pretty normal humans. They could be social media shots. However, they were generated by a recent type of algorithm: generative adversarial network, or GAN.

Nvidia researchers Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila posted details of the method to produce completely imaginary fake faces with stunning, almost eerie, realism (here’s the paper).

Convincing fakes

GANs employ two “dueling” neural networks to train a model to learn the nature of a dataset well enough to generate convincing fakes. When you apply GANs to images, this provides a way to generate often highly realistic still fakes you could use for extremely hard to detect social engineering attacks, especially combined with deep fake videos.

You can now generate a completely synthetic human face, map it on top of a video and make it say what you want, all using recent algos. See this brand new video doing full body synthesis which illustrates the problem.

The only thing lacking is equip that construct with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and a high-quality real-time back-end engine and you have your first evil AI that can scam untrained users into revealing their user name and password in one minute. Yikes.

No human supervision

Here is the new NVIDIA video (YouTube) that shows how GANs are able to do this without any human supervision. Unfortunately, it’s not getting any better on the net. You need to be on your toes with security top of mind.

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Cyber Safety Net is a KnowBe4 partner. Reposted with permission from https://blog.knowbe4.com/these-incredibly-realistic-fake-faces-show-how-ai-can-now-mess-with-us. Cyber Safety Net – keeping you safe online. See https://cybersafetynet.net/cyber-security-awareness-training/ to train and strengthen your human firewall. See https://youtu.be/UFpFesrcnvY and https://www.knowbe4.com/security-awareness-training-features/ to learn more.