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Chemistry of Art

This guide was created for Dr. Geeta Govindarajoo's Chemistry of Art class.

Fake Art and Deep Fakes

Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows anyone to generate images and videos using the images of real people available online. These are called deep fakes, and they are being used, sometimes with malicious intent, to influence you. Here are a few tips for spotting deep fake images.

Detect DeepFakes: How to counteract misinformation created by AI by MIT Media lab.

  1. Pay attention to the face. High-end DeepFake manipulations are almost always facial transformations. 
  2. Pay attention to the cheeks and forehead. Does the skin appear too smooth or too wrinkly? Is the agedness of the skin similar to the agedness of the hair and eyes? DeepFakes may be incongruent on some dimensions.
  3. Pay attention to the eyes and eyebrows. Do shadows appear in places that you would expect? DeepFakes may fail to fully represent the natural physics of a scene. 
  4. Pay attention to the glasses. Is there any glare? Is there too much glare? Does the angle of the glare change when the person moves? Once again, DeepFakes may fail to fully represent the natural physics of lighting.
  5. Pay attention to the facial hair or lack thereof. Does this facial hair look real? DeepFakes might add or remove a mustache, sideburns, or beard. But, DeepFakes may fail to make facial hair transformations fully natural.
  6. Pay attention to facial moles.  Does the mole look real? 
  7. Pay attention to blinking. Does the person blink enough or too much? 
  8. Pay attention to the lip movements. Some deepfakes are based on lip syncing. Do the lip movements look natural?

These eight questions are intended to help guide people looking through DeepFakes. High-quality DeepFakes are not easy to discern, but with practice, people can build intuition for identifying what is fake and what is real. You can practice trying to detect DeepFakes at Detect Fakes.

Another article from the BBC says to look at fingers and ears, which are hard to duplicate correctly. Also check the background to see if it's blurry or inconsistent with the supposed location of someone in it.

Woman at a Window, Unknown

Embed from Getty Images

Woman at a Window, The National Gallery, London

This image was discovered to have been a fake, painted over to be more appealing to buyers at the time. Like fake news, it covers up the facts in order to "sell" something, such as a viewpoint that may be targeted to a particular audience.

Here is a video from the National Gallery in London showing the conservation process which uncovered the original painting.

The Art of Reading Laterally

We used to tell students to evaluate sources by looking at things such as the domain of a website, for example .org vs .com, but this is no longer useful because .org can be used by sites that are created to share misinformation. Instead, you should open new tabs to search for information about the organization and people who created the website, as well as about any topics that it discusses. This is called "lateral reading", because you are searching alongside your source of information.

The ART of Reading Laterally

Image from EGUSD Digital Citizenship