An army of fake faces has been swarming over social media, in an effort by a mysterious pro-China group, to circulate and promote propaganda criticising Donald Trump. Appearing in the comments of Youtube videos and sharing posts on Facebook, you may not think twice about these seemingly "normal" accounts. However, as spotted by research company Graphika, these people aren't real, but instead a grim example of how AI can be used to deceive and manipulate what we see online.

Identifiable by blurry backgrounds and a never-changing eye-position, these profile pictures are not ones taken of real people, but instead created by a machine learning technology, thus allowing the group creating this AI-fueled campaign to pump out an army of convincingly-human social media accounts. General Adversarial Networks, the specific technology behind these manufactured profile pictures, create fake humans that can fool our own eyes by pitting two machine-learning algorithms against each other. One generates these faces while the other tries to spot if the face is genuine or AI-generated, till the face produced is almost impossible to tell apart from a real one, even by our own algorithms.

Fortunately, while the AI behind the “Spamouflage Dragon” campaign may have fooled most people, the propaganda videos and posts they chose to promote proved less convincing. Plagued by spelling and pronunciation errors, it's unlikely that in this case many people were fooled by the online campaign. Nonetheless, the use of AI in this way is telling of the future use of social media and artificial accounts to boost the visibility of fake news and propaganda. This won’t be the last time we see these techniques used, and when we do, it may not be so easy to spot.

Graphika Report - https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika_report_spamouflage_dragon_goes_to_america.pdf

Thumbnail credit: Graphika