From The Daily Californian
UC Berkeley deepfake expert warns of increasing risks of AI
By Ashley Huang
Hany Farid has built his career on exposing what is real and what is fabricated in a digital world.
A professor at UC Berkeley and Chief Science Officer at GetReal Labs, he studies how manipulated content spreads and how it can be detected. His interest began in the late 1990s after reading the “Federal Rules of Evidence.”
At the time, courts considered digital images equivalent to film negatives. That discovery pushed him to consider how digital files could be authenticated. A second turning point came when Farid was a faculty member at Dartmouth College and used Photoshop to paste a friend’s face onto a tennis player’s photo. The edit left visible signs of manipulation, convincing him that digital forensics was possible.
As the internet advanced and artificial intelligence, or AI, tools emerged, Farid said “national security issues” became more serious. Generative systems can now create images, audio and video without cameras or recording equipment, which has outpaced earlier technological revolutions.
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
