Amazon Teams Up With Facebook To Tackle Deepfakes

Amidst the emerging rise of deepfakes videos throughout the Internet and its unexpected effects on our society, Facebook is going to get some extra help from Amazon Web Services, suggesting that they will collaborate in the campaign of weeding out deepfakes content, called Deepfakes Detection Challenge – DFDC. Besides taking the role of a technical partner, Amazon’s subsidiary will also be a member of the committee overseeing the challenge.

As reported, a number of machine learning experts from Amazon will contribute technical support and guidance, along with $1 million as credits if any team is in need of cloud services to work on the detection. In the meantime, there’ll be two academic advisors from the Univ. of Naples and the Technical Univ. of Munich: Luisa Verdoliva and Laura Leal-Taixe, respectively. To help researchers spot deepfakes, Facebook is also giving them some of the dedicated samples they need. Firstly, it will release 5,000 examples amongst more than 100,000 videos that are explicitly created for the project.

At present, a bunch of big names is backing up the DFDC, including tech giants (Microsoft), academic institutes (Univ. of Oxford, MIT) and prestigious publishers (The New York Times) and so on. However, the presence of AWS especially shows its shared interest in fighting against deepfakes content. For many of us, fake news and the likes of it have brought a lot of risky problems that they have had to deal with. Shortly, technology advancement now comes at an unpredictable cost.