Facebook and Microsoft announce a contest to detect professionally created deepfakes

(Facebook)

Facebook, Microsoft, and others have announced a contest to create tech that detects deepfake videos.

The contest is called the Deepfake Detection Challenge and will run from late 2019 through early 2020. It will use videos with professional actors, commissioned by Facebook. Contestants will be tasked with writing code that accurately finds telltale signs that a video was altered. The contest appears to be open to anyone.

It will not, according to the blog post announcing the contest, involve Facebook user data.

The goal, according to Facebook CTO Mark Schroepfer, is to help create new detection standards as deepfakes become more and more convincing:

The industry doesn't have a great data set or benchmark for detecting them. We want to catalyze more research and development in this area and ensure that there are better open source tools to detect deepfakes.

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