This light-powered AI can spot deepfakes with nearly 98% accuracy

UCLA researchers built an AI system that uses light to analyze more than a dozen videos simultaneously, detecting deepfakes with nearly 98% accuracy. Its speed, low energy demands, and resistance to attacks could make it a powerful tool for screening the growing flood of AI-generated video. This light-powered AI can spot deepfakes with nearly 98% accuracy.

Unlike conventional systems that typically examine videos one after another using digital hardware, the UCLA technology can analyze 15 or more video streams at the same time. The key difference is that part of the detection process takes place through the physical propagation of light. This allows many videos to be evaluated simultaneously during a single optical pass rather than requiring each one to move separately through a conventional digital processing pipeline.

The technology is detailed in the study " Scalable, Energy-Efficient Optical-Neural Architecture for Multiplexed Deepfake Video Detection," published in eLight. The researchers designed the optical AI system to serve as a high-throughput, attack-resilient first layer of defense for screening large amounts of manipulated and AI-generated video. The Growing Challenge of Deepfake Detection Rapid improvements in generative AI have made synthetic videos increasingly realistic, increasing the need for detection systems that are both accurate and capable of operating at large scale.