Berkeley Talks

Two decades ago, when Hany Farid first began studying digital misinformation and manipulated media, fake content was easier to detect. Today, that landscape has shifted with a speed that he describes as “breathtaking.” In just the last year or two, he says, we’ve moved from an era where a computer takes seconds or minutes to produce a static file to "full-blown interactive deepfakes" that can hold a live conversation in real time.In this Berkeley Talks episode, Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, discusses the rapidly accelerating landscape of generative AI and the unique threat it poses to our collective understanding of the world.Farid notes that tools once reserved for governments or well-funded organizations are now freely available, radically expanding the threat landscape. “We have taken a mechanism that was in the hands of state-sponsored actors and bad actors and given it to 8 billion people in the world," he says. This democratization of powerful te