Actress Rashmika Mandanna falls victim to the deepfake technology. Read more.
Claim
The viral video shows the Indian actress Rashmika Mandanna coming out of an elevator in a black outfit.
Rating
Explanation
A 7-second video supposedly featuring actress Rashmika Mandanna in a black sleeveless jumpsuit is viral on social media. Many social media users have also shared the 7-second clip with various captions and attributing it to the South Indian actress. Some people even commented that it looks fake. Let’s check the veracity of this video.
What’s the truth?
On a careful watch of the video, we were able to notice a different woman entering the lift in the beginning of the video and then, the face suddenly changes into the face of actress Rashmika Mandanna. This is a common trait in videos which use the deepfake technology.
While advancing our search, we found that the original video is actually of Zara Patel, a British Indian influencer on Instagram and the video can be found on her page.
Rashmika Mandanna herself broke silence about the video on her X page. She expressed shock and hurt about the deepfake video while also highlight the scary implications of the technology.
Likewise, Zara Patel, the woman in the viral video, has also posted on her Instagram story that the video had been manipulated using deepfake and added that she is deeply upset by what is happening.
Conclusion:
The supposed video of actress Rashmika Mandanna is a digitally manipulated video of Zara Patel and it was created using deepfake and advanced AI tools.
Deepfake Technology:
Deepfake technology is a type of artificial intelligence used to create convincing images, audio, and video hoaxes. The term describes both the technology and the resulting bogus content and is a portmanteau of deep learning and fake.
Deepfakes often transform existing source content where one person is swapped for another. They also create entirely original content where someone is represented doing or saying something they didn’t do or say. While deepfakes pose serious threats, they also have legitimate uses, such as video game audio and entertainment, and customer support and caller response applications, such as call forwarding and receptionist services.
How are they made?
These videos are created by machines that use deep learning algorithms. They scan through thousands of face shots of using an AI algorithm (called encoder) that allows the machines to learn similarities between the two faces and reduces them to their shared common features, compressing the images in the process.
The encoder then feeds the wrong image to the original source and another algorithm called the decoder reconstructs the face with the expressions and orientation. For a convincing video, this has to be done on every frame.
