(upbeat music)
(air swooshing)
- Manipulating can take many forms.
For example, the image, video, audio or text
may have been edited.
It could have new objects added to it,
or it could be totally synthetic.
That is, the content could be entirely generated
by digital means.
Essentially, there are two types of manipulated media.
One where you have a combination
of synthetic material and real material,
and one where the material's totally synthetic.
One important point to keep in mind
is that not all manipulated media is bad.
This technology has been around in various forms for a while
and can be used for good, constructive purposes.
For example, we can think of media generated
by augmented reality as generally a good form
of manipulated media.
That is where, for example,
you're wearing a set of augmented reality glasses
and you're looking at the real world,
and what you are seeing is a mixture of the actual world
and also synthetic images that are being generated
by our computer and being overlaid on that world.
This type of manipulated media is created
in order to help the wearer of the glasses
better complete various tasks.
It could be used for training purposes and things like that.
But there are also bad forms of manipulated media.
Media that is edited for maligned intent.
For example, you might happen across a story or a post
on the internet that shows a picture of a distressing event
purported to have occurred at a certain time or place,
but in reality, that picture was taken
at a totally different time and totally different place.
For example, you might be looking at an image
that was shot in Detroit several years ago,
but the post in question is saying the picture
is from some fire happening in Minnesota last week.
This is a common type of manipulated media,
known as repurposed content.
In many other cases, when researchers analysis set out
to discover whether a particular piece of media
has been manipulated, they seek to answer a set
of five questions,
and we will call these the five forensic questions
of manipulated media.
The first question is the so-called detection problem,
where we ask the question:
Is the media element manipulated?
If the answer is yes, then we move on to the next question,
known as the localization problem,
where now we know this media contains manipulated content,
we ask where.
What parts of the images have been manipulated or generated?
Having determined
that the media contains manipulated material
and having determined the instances
or locations of that manipulation,
we then move on to the third question,
the so-called technical attribution problem.
Here we are trying to as ascertain which computer tools
were used to manipulate or generate this content.
Having answered issues regarding technical attribution,
researchers and analysts of manipulated media then seek
to solve the social attribution problem.
This is a question of who did it.
Was this an instance of manipulation done
by a particular political actor?
For instance, was it done by a nation state
or some lone wolf?
The fifth and final question to answer
is also the most difficult to answer,
and this is the characterization problem.
Essentially, why.
Why did the actor manipulate the content?
What was their motivation?
(upbeat music fading)