From Entrepreneur
‘This Isn’t Funny Anymore’: AI Deepfakes Are Stealing Millions Every Year — and These Entrepreneurs Are Racing to Stop Them
By Liz Brody
Your CFO is on the video call asking you to transfer $25 million. He gives you all the bank info. Pretty routine. You got it.
But, What the — ? It wasn’t the CFO? How can that be? You saw him with your own eyes and heard that undeniable voice you always half-listen for. Even the other colleagues on the screen weren’t really them. And yes, you already made the transaction...
So that’s one kind of entrepreneur involved in this race. On Zoom, a few days after visiting Colman, I meet another: He is Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and cofounder of a detection startup called GetReal Security. Its client list, according to the CEO, includes John Deere and Visa. Farid is considered an OG of digital image forensics (he was part of a team that developed PhotoDNA to help fight online child sexual abuse material, for example). And to give me the full-on sense of the risk involved, he pulls an eerie sleight-of-tech: As he talks to me on Zoom, he is replaced by a new person — an Asian punk who looks 40 years younger, but who continues to speak with Farid’s voice. It's a deepfake in real time...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley
