The Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) analysed a video posted from the Instagram account of someone who identifies as Ira Sharma on their profile and had about 266,000 followers, at the last count. After using A.I. detection tools to check the authenticity of the video we concluded that the woman who features regularly in the reels posted from that account is not a real person but a creation of generative A.I.
The DAU tipline received an Instagram link for verification, which led to an 11-second reel posted from Ms. Sharma’s account, in which a woman is apparently moving to the beats of a Hindi song. In the first three seconds of the video if one looks at the woman’s spectacle frame, especially around the right temple and eyebrow, a strange shimmer is noticeable that is not characteristic of normal glasses. Her face and hair seem unusually smooth and awkwardly illuminated.
After going through the other reels uploaded from the same account we noticed that her face had a flawless and sharper texture compared to other body parts such as the arms and neck, visible in different reels.
We ran the video that we received on the tipline through the A.I. detection tools of Hive AI and TrueMedia. Hive AI’s deepfake detection tool indicated that the video was indeed a deepfake.
TrueMedia’s A.I. manipulation analysis identified the video as “highly suspicious”. Their tool breaks down the overall analysis into multiple components, including deepfake face detection and face manipulation, and awards a confidence score to each component based on the findings. It gave a 100 percent confidence score to deepfake face detection and an 82 percent score to face manipulation for this particular video.
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DAU’s partner BOOM, a fact-checking organisation, had recently published a story about the content posted from the Instagram account that featured the video that we analysed; their reporting further helped us establish that the video has been produced using generative A.I. and that it is a deepfake.
(Written by Debraj Sarkar and edited by Pamposh Raina.)
Kindly Note: The manipulated audio/video files that we receive on our tipline are not embedded in our assessment reports because we do not intend to contribute to their virality.
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