How to Identify Deepfakes
While deepfakes are becoming increasingly realistic as technology advances, detecting them is often done by looking carefully for certain information in the photo or video content (for example, eyes that don’t seem to blink naturally). It can be super helpful to zoom in and look for unnatural or blurred edges around the mouth, neck/collar, or chest. That is often where misalignments and mismatches between the original content and the superimposed content can be seen.
On videos, one can slow down the clip and watch for visual inconsistencies such as possible lip-syncing or jittering. Furthermore, keep an eye out for any moments the subject displays a lack of emotion when there should be emotion based on what is being said, seems to mispronounce a word, or is part of any other strange discrepancies. Finally, running reverse image searches on photos (or a screenshot from a video) can point you towards the original video before it was doctored. At that point, carefully compare the two pieces of content to determine which one has been manipulated. The bottom line is that you should trust your senses; when we slow down to look and listen very carefully at content, we generally can sense when something is amiss.