experts on biometrics<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe leap in realism between first-generation AI videos and today\u2019s deepfake content is making detection harder for experts. Generative AI footage produced before 2022 was riddled with inconsistencies: faces morphing between frames, warped jawlines, phantom limbs appearing and then vanishing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Newer AI footage holds identities stable across hundreds of frames with no perceptible degradation. It can even replicate the texture of authentic video\u00a0\u2014 the tremble of a handheld phone, the chaos of a crowd.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople used to need to know things like how to use a darkroom to manipulate media, which took years of training,\u201d said Siwei Lyu, a professor at the University at Albany and director of its media forensics lab. \u201cBut now with AI, you don\u2019t need to know anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
At his Berkeley office on a recent afternoon, Farid clicked the \u201cmedia requests\u201d folder on his desktop, containing all the footage that\u2019s ever been sent to him for verification by partnering media outlets. To demonstrate, he pulled up the video showing the apparent Iranian bombing. Scrolling through, he began describing how he detects inauthentic footage. He paused on a frame that seemed to show computers shattering and flying off the table.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis is exactly what you\u2019d expect a strike to be like,\u201d he said, pointing at the screen. \u201cIt just obliterates the place, it\u2019s so violent. Even this\u201d\u00a0\u2014 he hovered his mouse over a ray of light in the corner of the frame\u00a0\u2014 \u201cThis is called lens flare. It\u2019s exactly what you\u2019d get when a light is shining directly into the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, he noted, there were hidden clues that identified the video as a fake. Dragging his mouse over the scene, he began to identify the scene\u2019s \u201cvanishing point\u201d: the single dot in space where the lines of all the physical objects would converge if the image were a real three-dimensional scene, captured by a camera. Using his cursor, Farid drew a number of straight red lines emanating from each object, then extended their endpoints outward to see whether they would intersect. They didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis shows an anomaly,\u201d Farid said. \u201cA physical inconsistency.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
To confirm his findings, he dragged the screenshot to what he calls his \u201cforensic workbench\u201d where a software program runs a slew of measurements. It searches for information on the image\u2019s history, the identity and location of whoever created the original footage and the path it has traveled since creation.<\/p>\n
Within seconds, a red rectangular sign began flashing in the app\u2019s upper-right corner: \u201cSYNTHETIC.\u201d<\/p>\n
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After he initially found the footage to be fake, Farid contacted the editor who\u2019d sent it to let her know. She didn\u2019t move forward with the story.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Hany Farid fields requests from the government and news outlets to evaluate videos for signs they are AI-generated.<\/p>\n
John Tully\/For the S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
Out of the darkroom<\/p>\n
When Farid was 2, his family moved from Germany to Rochester, New York, where his father took a job at Eastman Kodak as a photo chemist. Growing up, Farid remembers watching his father develop images in darkrooms, bewitched by the smell of the chemicals.<\/p>\n
While at the University of Rochester, Farid\u2019s mother encouraged him to take a computer science class. It felt like he had found something he was truly good at. He made it his major, and went on to earn his Ph.D in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Later, while completing his postdoctoral work at MIT in 1998, he had a career-defining epiphany. Thumbing through a newly updated copy of\u00a0 \u201cFederal Rules of Evidence,\u201d Farid came across Rule 1001 of article X, stating that for the first time, U.S. courts were allowing digital images to be submitted as evidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just remember thinking,\u2019\u2018that\u2019s a really bad idea,\u2019\u2019 he said. \u2018Because digital images are malleable.\u2019 Until then, only 35 mm negatives had been categorized as \u2018original evidence\u2019 in court because physicality made them difficult to alter.<\/p>\n
Farid went home and began exploring how to detect manipulation in digital images. Using Photoshop, a relatively new computer program at the time, he began altering photographs\u00a0\u2014 swapping the heads of his friends\u00a0\u2014 then writing software to detect markers of the manipulation and reverse-engineer what he had done.<\/p>\n
In 1999, when Farid became a professor at Dartmouth, he continued his efforts, establishing a lab that worked on some of the first digital authentication cases for the Associated Press and the FBI. But trying to establish a new academic discipline, which he called digital media forensics, was difficult. Funding was scarce, and there were no journals or conferences at which he and others could present their findings. Even most computer scientists didn\u2019t understand the problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the time he was working on these things, basically nobody was,\u201d said Ted Adelson, professor of computer and cognitive sciences at MIT and Farid\u2019s postdoctoral advisor. \u201cNobody had any idea how to approach it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the two decades since then, the field has exploded. Experts like Farid are racing to keep up with users harnessing deepfake technology for malicious ends. Scammers have already begun using sophisticated audio and video deepfakes to defraud families and older people. Rather than using premade audio fakes, the current standard, impersonators will soon be able to perfectly mimic the voice of a distressed family member in an emergency, in real-time calls. According to the Deloitte Center for Financial Services, AI fraud could cost the U.S. $40 billion by 2027.<\/p>\n
A similar boom is happening around unauthorized deepfake pornography. In December 2025, images began flooding X showing women and children whose clothing had been digitally removed or altered to depict them in suggestive poses\u00a0\u2014 all generated by Elon Musk\u2019s chatbot, Grok. The European Commission estimates that 98% of deepfakes are sexually explicit material.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI companies commercializing and monetizing these tools are not doing enough to keep them safe,\u201d Farid said.<\/p>\n
![\"Hany]()
<\/p>\n
Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor, is a go-to source for governments and journalists seeking to verify whether a video is AI-generated or real. His techniques include analyzing shadows and light.<\/p>\n
John Tully\/For the S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
The liar\u2019s dividend\u00a0<\/p>\n
A few recent bills, like the Take It Down Act, signed into law in May 2025, and the DEFIANCE Act, passed by the Senate in January 2026 and now headed to the House, are meant to protect individuals from nonconsensual imagery. But they only apply after a person has already been harmed, Farid said \u2013\u2013 and address only one small part of the problem.<\/p>\n
Farid is working on one possible solution as part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a project drafting standards for marking media as authentic as soon as a camera captures it by sealing elements of the media\u2019s metadata immediately.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite these efforts, Farid remains deeply worried by new-generation deepfakes and their potential for abuse, including by politicians and governments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In January, the White House posted a digitally altered photo on X of Minneapolis civil rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong after she was arrested during an ICE protest.<\/p>\n
In the altered image, Armstrong appeared visibly distressed, with tears streaming down her face. Her skin tone also appeared to have been darkened. By comparison, an image posted to X 30 minutes earlier by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem depicted Armstrong looking notably calmer.<\/p>\n
Having the White House publish synthetic content is deeply troubling, Farid said, because it muddies the historical record and makes it harder for the public to trust any visual evidence published by government officials.<\/p>\n
It also contributes to what\u2019s known as the \u201cliars\u2019 dividend\u201d\u00a0\u2014 making it easier for officials to dismiss real, incriminating footage as \u201cAI\u201d when faced with documented accusations of wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou create instability in a society not by convincing people of a lie, but by making the signals so noisy that people don\u2019t know what to believe,\u201d Farid said. When people are exposed to generative AI content from state-sponsored actors, he said, it encourages them to \u201ccheck out\u201d and disengage from the democratic system. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Even history may be subject to manipulation. AI videos circulating online over the past year have begun showing historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein behaving in ways they never did, or delivering speeches they never gave.<\/p>\n
Farid worries about what will happen when younger people encounter these videos before being taught the truth about these monumental figures. What happens when fiction becomes the first impression?<\/p>\n
\u201cOur new reality is that we don\u2019t have a shared reality,\u201d Farid said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s exceedingly dangerous for us as individuals, institutions, societies and democracies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fiona Ulrich<\/a> is a freelance writer.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor who specializes in the field of digital forensics, sits at his home…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[2007,184,723,15,143,145,144,995,149],"class_list":["post-353111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-ai","tag-bay-area","tag-crime","tag-education","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-tech","tag-uc-berkeley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}