According to CSE, its capacity to produce deepfakes outpaces its capacity to identify them.
Canada’s cyber espionage agency has issued a warning, stating that it will not be able to detect every instance of a deceptive deepfake video used by bad actors hoping to influence the next federal election through artificial intelligence tools.
The warning was published in a fresh cyber threat report that the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) made public on Wednesday morning.
Ahead of Canada’s upcoming federal election, the foreign signals intelligence agency stated that “it’s very likely” that foreign adversaries or “hacktivists” will use artificial intelligence (AI) to sway voters.
“We assess that foreign adversaries and hacktivists are likely to weaponize generative AI within the next two years to create deepfake videos and images depicting politicians and government officials,” the report states.
Digitally altered videos that aren’t authentic are called deepfakes. There were no particular instances of deepfakes in Canada given in the report.
The organization, which is the leading expert on cyber security in Canada, issued a warning, saying it is unlikely to be able to keep up with the sheer volume of deepfake videos it expects.
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We believe there is a high probability that the ability to produce deepfakes outpaces our capacity to identify them. According to the CSE’s report, “current publicly available detection models struggle to reliably distinguish between real content and deepfakes.”
“Given the ineffectiveness of deepfake detection models, and the increasing availability of generative AI, it is likely that influence campaigns using generative AI that target voters will increasingly go undetected by the general public.”
According to CSE, there are already thousands of deepfakes manipulating politician video clips in circulation.
It linked to a deepfake video that appeared to show US President Joe Biden criticizing transgender people and went viral online earlier this year.
