SXSW Panel Replay: Real or Not, Defending Authenticity in a Digital World

Have you ever wondered if that video you're watching, the photo you're looking at, or even that person on the other line is the real deal?

Deepfakes aren't just Hollywood magic anymore—they're part of our everyday lives, found in everything from the news we consume to the memes we share. During this panel, experts dive into the world of deepfakes to break down the impacts of digital deception and what we can do about it. Industry, government, and academic leaders discussed how new analytical tools — including those developed by DARPA's Semantic Forensics program — can help organizations and individuals protect themselves against manipulated media.

Speakers included:
• Donie O'Sullivan (moderator), Politics and Technology Correspondent, CNN
• Wil Corvey, Semantic Forensics Program Manager, DARPA
• Matt Turek, Deputy Director, Information Innovation Office, DARPA
• Nick Dufour, Misinformation Mitigation Researcher, Google
• Amruta Deshpande, Senior Research Scientist, Graphika
• James Verbus, Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, LinkedIn

DARPA recently announced its analytic catalog of open-source resources developed under SemaFor for use by researchers and industry. As capabilities mature and become available, they will be added to this repository.

The agency also launched the AI Forensics Open Research Challenge Evaluation (AI FORCE). This open community research effort invites participants to contribute their expertise in developing innovative and robust machine learning, or deep learning, models that can accurately detect synthetic AI-generated images. Through a series of mini challenges, AI FORCE asks participants to build models that can discern between authentic images, including ones that may have been manipulated or edited using non-AI methods, and fully synthetic AI-generated images.

For more information on the above efforts and resources, visit https://semanticforensics.com/.