Along with nuclear weapons and selfie sticks, deepfakes are among those rare technological developments that most of us wish didn’t develop at all.
A portmanteau of ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’, ‘deepfake’ refers to an image, video, or audio snippet that synthesize real material with AI-generated content. You may have seen the TikTok of Tom Cruise dancing in his backyard or the photo of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga coat (neither of which were real, of course), but for every harmless meme, there are 100 nefarious deepfake scams designed to trick people out of their money.
Indeed, the number of deepfake-based fraud attempts has reportedly risen by 2,137% over the last three years – we ourselves reported on a case involving a “Deepfake CFO” who tricked employees into handing over $25 million – and given the inflammatory nature of today’s politics landscape, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction.
Wouldn’t it be handy, then, to have a deepfake detection tool baked into your smartphone? A warning system designed to expose bad actors before they convince you of their false identity? Enter Honor, the Chinese mobile maker behind some of the best phones in the UK and Europe, who last year announced Deepfake Detection , a smartphone feature that can identify and warn users against digitally manipulated content.
Honor’s Deepfake Detection feature in action (Image credit: Honor / Future)
The on-device tool examines frame-by-frame information such as eye contact, lighting, image clarity, and video playback to detect flaws that are imperceptible to the human eye. If inconsistencies are identified, the Deepfake Detection feature triggers a popup that reads: “Honor scam alert. It looks like the other person could be using AI to swap their face.” Pretty cool, right?
Honor has confirmed that its unique new tool will be available globally from April, meaning owners of top-end Honor handsets like the Honor Magic 7 Pro will soon be better defended against deepfake-using scammers.
There’s just one problem.
Deepfake Detection only works during video calls, meaning you’ll need to be targeted by a real-life, video-calling scammer for it to have any use.
Sure, the feature is still valuable for that particular use case – I’m sure my grandma will be grateful for it the next time someone comes for her credit card details – but in my experience, the bigger (or at least more common) risk posed by deepfakes lies in how they’re used to propagate misinformation on third-party platforms.
Social media platforms like X and Facebook are awash with content that’s been manipulated by AI – whether that’s deepfakes or wholly AI-generated image and video content. We all like to think we can spot a fake, but this technology has come so far in so little time. Indeed, a recent study found that AI literacy among the general public is depressingly low , with only 0.1% of participants able to correctly distinguish between real and deepfake stimuli.
It’s all fun and games until the retweets turn to riots.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this study found that older adults are particularly susceptible to AI-generated deception, and while younger participants were more confident in their ability to detect deepfakes, their actual performance in the study was equally poor.
The point being: deepfakes are hard to spot, even for those of us who are chronically online. A built-in smartphone tool that identifies video-calling deepfake scammers is great, and Honor deserves praise for developing one. But the real deepfake battleground is not in our front-facing cameras, it’s on our For You Pages. If I could engage Deepfake Detection while scrolling through Instagram, it would make phones like the Honor Magic 7 Pro even more useful.
(Image credit: Shutterstock/ Lightspring)
There are, of course, reasons why Honor can’t (or won’t) expand the functionality of Deepfake Detection to third-party platforms, and while the company hasn’t yet shared what they are (I’ve asked), I suspect that it has something to do with these platforms being ring-fenced with watertight terms of use policies.
Perhaps, then, the onus is on the platforms themselves to implement built-in reality check buttons. The likes of X and Facebook aren’t exactly basking in public trust right now, and while Meta does claim to “remove misleading manipulated media [that] has been edited or synthesized,” a quick browse of your parents’ Facebook feeds will confirm that more needs to be done. Smartphone manufacturers like Honor can lend a hand, but they need to be allowed to do so.
Scammers are a scourge, but misinformation is the real enemy. Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga coat is funny, but what about when Pope Francis goes viral for denouncing catholicism? It’s all fun and games until the retweets turn to riots. Our smartphones should be as good at spotting deepfakes as they are serving them up to us, and I hope more manufacturers (and indeed social media platforms) are working on ways to tackle this issue.
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