By Nirmesh Shah, Research Scientist at Sony Research India
8th March 2022
In 1845, Edgar Allan famously wrote in one of his short stories, “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see” to encourage skepticism and with an intention of teaching people not to trust gossip. However, the same quote can be extended to “Do not believe anything you hear and see” in today’s era of deep learning. The advent of huge computational powers and the rapid advancement in deep learning technologies have made it possible to generate audio and video clips that seem very real to us. Broadly, deep learning models can be classified in two categories, discriminative models and generative models.
Since these technologies are very powerful and can easily manipulate any video or audio clips, it can have negative implications on society and can even spread hatred. Hence, I would like to conclude by emphasizing that “it would be advisable to never believe anything you see or hear on the internet!”