How can we distinguish between fake video and genuine audiovisual material which is trustworthy? Synthetic video is becoming more sophisticated by the day - so are the risks for audiences as well as media professionals to be misled.

The BBC Blue Room Lab will show it all at our Annual Conference 2019 – from face swapping on the Internet to deep fakery such as imposing faces onto somebody else’s bodies in video materials. All of it can be done by users and consumers.

Jacob Markham, Melissa Wood and Shayan Sardarizadeh from the Blue Room will be with us all the time during the Conference to lead everyone who is curious enough through the advantages and the perils of synthetic video and audio - they will demonstrate:

Face Swapping
Swap your face with anyone on the internet. Showing how this is now clearly in the hands of the consumer. Digital manipulation and synthetic media apps are becoming increasingly popular.

Deepfakery
See how faces are superimposed onto bodies in the video using machine learning. This tech has been used to start to show ‘deepfake’ videos of people being superimposed onto bodies of others and there is a trend towards the use of these technologies to mislead.

Make Me Multilingual
Using BBC World News Broadcaster, Matthew Amroliwala, the BBC Blue Room in partnership with London start-up Synthesia, used the latest in AI dubbing technology to create a video of Matthew speaking 3 languages he has never learnt. By exploiting advancements in machine learning, it is now possible to seamlessly reversion content in any language you want.

Trump Turing Test
Can you tell the synthetic fake from the real fake when it comes to this well-known voice? Even though a truly intelligent machine is still some years off - we’re already having to figure out whether the news is coming from a trusted source or a deceitful computer system.

How to spot a fake
The coming together of research skills and AI
The creation of synthetic video and audio is improving all the time. Will we soon be at the stage where we will not be able to spot the difference between the real and the fabricated?

The detection of content created to mislead and how it is spread is vital. Combining established research skills and emerging artificial intelligence offers the possible solution. Join us at the conference and experience it!

left to right: Jacob Markham, Melissa Wood, Shayan Sardarizadeh