It probably doesn’t need to be said that online dating isn’t easy and is quite a stressful thing we do in the name of meeting that someone special.
Well I’m sorry to bust all the single people folk on dating apps but finding someone online is about to be even more difficult thanks to a worrying rise of deep fakes.
For those who are unaware, deep fakes are incredibly real-looking images or videos of people that are in actuality fake and were created using advancing AI technology.
In the context of online dating, there’s an increasing danger of deep fakes flooding dating apps, there’s a higher possibility of swiping right on fake profiles.
As if it wasn’t hard to have someone swipe right on your profile, it’s now even harder to find that special someone since more and more fake people are polluting the pool of real people and it’s incredibly difficult to tell the difference between the two.
This problem actually goes beyond dating as deep fakes has started coming up in actual news and causing genuine confusion, such as the deep fake of Mark Zuckerberg that circled the internet and the altered video of Nancy Pelosi seemingly appearing drunk. And of course there was that gender-swap filter on Snapchat that caused mass confusion on many levels among people of every gender.
Luckily for single people and those trying to debunk all the deep fakes out there, there are a few ways to identify what’s fake and real. AI-created faces have slight imperfections, such as weirdly-placed hair, facial asymmetry, and smudges on certain surfaces like jewellery and teeth, For videos, deep fakes generally blink far less frequently than real people so keep an eye on their eyes.
So next time you’re swiping and you’re wondering whether a certain person is real or not, your worries are definitely warranted. Be careful and safe swiping, everyone.
