New technique uses light to spot deepfakes in seconds

Many deepfake videos are easy to spot — the eyes move in strange ways, there’s an extra finger on a hand or the light is weirdly distributed — but many are just as hard, if not impossible. Recent research in Nature Communications found that humans are able to spot deepfakes only 50% of the time.

In a leg-up to humans in this fight against unreal information, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have found a way to tell if a video is a deepfake based on the light in it. In lab tests, the method was so good that it almost never failed to spot a manipulated video.