Deepfakes Now Have Heartbeats, and That's as Scary as It Sounds

If you saw a video of a politician saying something daring or a celebrity doing something unexpected, what would you think?  The face looks real, the voice is perfect, and if you look closely, you can even see their heart beating through their skin.  But none of it ever really happened.  Welcome to the next level of Deepfakes!

A new study in Frontiers in Imaging shows that AI-generated movies can now copy not only a person's voice and look, but also the subtle rhythm of their heartbeat, which was previously thought to be too hard for deepfakes to do.  That's going to be a tough challenge for the AI detectors now. 

What are Deepfakes?

Deepfake is the outcome of increasing AI advancement. These are videos made using artificial intelligence to make it look like someone is doing or saying something they never did.  They use real videos, called "driving videos," and then change the person's voice, expression, or identity digitally. Some uses of deepfakes are innocent, such as face filters or celebrity impressions. However, deepfakes can also be used to propagate false information, hurt people's reputations, and make explicit content without consent. 

Deepfake crimes are on the rise in India. Fake videos of politicians, actors, and influencers have become popular, making people angry or confused.  The medium has been used to make pornographic recordings of women without their permission and rob money in several situations, causing suffering in the real world and online harassment.  Law enforcement is having a hard time keeping up, and the rules we have now don't necessarily cover AI dangers that are racing at high speed. 

The New Study: Real Heartbeats, Fake Faces 

Researchers have been employing a medical-grade technology called remote photoplethysmography (rPPP) to find deepfakes. This is a novel method in telehealthcare which basically uses webcams to track vital signs. It works by keeping an eye on small variations in the colour of a person's skin that are caused by blood flow. These small changes that are connected to your pulse are hard to fake. 

“Our results show that a realistic heartbeat may be added by an attacker on purpose, but can also be ‘inherited’ inadvertently from the driving genuine video. Small variations in skin tone of the real person get transferred to the deepfake together with facial motion, so that the original pulse is replicated in the fake video,” said Dr Peter Eisert, a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and author of this new study in Frontiers in Imaging.

What happens next? 

This finding could make it a lot difficult to trust what we see on the internet.  If deepfakes can fake biometric signals like a heartbeat, standard detection systems may soon not work at all.  However, Dr Peter suggests that there is some hope here. He states that even though deepfakes can fake a real heartbeat, they often fail to accurately replicate subtle variations in blood flow across the face. To break it down into the simplest terms, it means that while the overall pulse might look real, the fine-grained patterns of blood flow in different areas of the face will not be accurate and can be picked up by the deepfake detectors to flag the video. 

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