Truth or lies: Artistic depiction of a new optical AI technology that detects deepfake videos with light diffraction. (Courtesy: Ozcan Lab @UCLA)

A new hybrid optical-neural system can detect artificially generated “deepfake” videos with up to 97.8% accuracy. The technique, which was developed by a team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the US, can simultaneously process 15 or more independent video streams and is less energy-hungry than existing methods with similar levels of performance.

As artificial intelligence (AI) has improved, so has the quality of AI-generated videos. While many early models churned out content with glaring errors such as extra fingers and nonsense text, more up-to-date versions of generative diffusion models (for example) are now capable of producing highly realistic images and videos. Indeed, a recent study found that humans correctly identify deepfakes only around 50% of the time .…