Janet Coats Comments on Fighting Artificial Intelligence Deepfakes

Janet Coats, managing director of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology, is featured in “Fighting AI Deepfakes,” published in Issue 12 of NITECH, the NATO Communications and Information Agency’s official magazine.

Coats comments on the growing challenges of identifying and understanding deepfakes which are often rooted in manipulation.

According to Coats, “Deep fakes are used to create messaging that is disingenuous or misleading, with the intention of changing people’s perceptions, beliefs or behaviors. They’re often disseminated to create a vision of somebody that is either more positive than in reality or, more commonly, more negative. Video-first platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels are now more obvious hosts for deepfakes. That said, malicious deepfake creators will choose the platform based on the demographic they are trying to reach.”

Coats questions how to help people become more skeptical and how to get them to question what they are seeing.

“There are a few routes we can take. One is to foster better media literacy to help people analyse the media they are seeing. There is also the potential to use AI as a tool against deepfakes. If we train a machine in deepfake detection, we could use AI tools as a detection and early warning system,” she said.

NITECH Issue 12 was distributed at the NATO Edge 24 Conference held in Tampa from Dec. 3-5.

Posted: December 5, 2024
Category: AI at CJC News, College News, Trust News
Tagged as: AI, Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology, Deepfakes, Janet Coats