From Science
Reality Check
By Kai Kupferschmidt
Was it real? The clip showed a downward streak of black through a clear blue sky, the silhouette of a U.S. Tomahawk missile like a metallic bird of prey diving for the kill. Then the impact, a plume of black smoke rising over buildings, palm trees, and electrical wires. By the time the video arrived in Hany Farid’s inbox on a Sunday morning in March, experts had already confirmed the scene showed Minab, the city in southern Iran where a missile strike had killed more than 150 people at a girls’ elementary school a week earlier. The U.S. government had denied responsibility, claiming a rogue Iranian missile was to blame. But the video, released overnight by an Iranian news agency, told a different story. Journalists had emailed Farid’s company, GetReal Security, asking him to verify the footage.
Farid, a specialist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of the world’s leading experts in determining whether a photo or video has been manipulated. Since helping to found the field of digital forensics more than 20 years ago, he has kept pace with massive technological change. “I would consider him to be sort of the dean of digital forensics, because he’s been at it for so long,” says Santiago Lyon, former director of photography at the Associated Press, who now works on online safety at Adobe. In artificial intelligence (AI), Farid is facing his biggest challenge yet.
That Sunday morning, settling in front of a computer with his wife, Emily Cooper, in their home in the hills over Berkeley, Farid went to work. His first impulse was to be suspicious. The war in Iran had already produced a firehose of AI-generated images. Why had it taken a week for this video to become public? The low resolution of the footage did not help his confidence either...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley
