7 NEWSFEED Updates & Upgrades
The telling signs of disappearing facial features or audio glitches usually make deepfakes relatively easy to spot, but the technology is rapidly improving. Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer is worried that AI experts are spending too much time perfecting deep fakes and not enough time finding ways to detect them. In response, Facebook, Microsoft, Steering Committee on AI and Media Integrity, composed of a coalition of organisations, including Facebook, the BBC, Microsoft and the human rights organisation Witness. Facebook is putting up a total of $10 million for the project. FACEBOOK CALL FOR DEEPFAKE FIGHTERS the Partnership on AI coalition and academics from seven universities have come together to build the Deep Fake Detection Challenge (DFDC). Open to the public, the challenge will include a leader board, and cash grants and awards for those offering solutions “to produce technology that everyone can use to better detect when AI has been used to alter a video in order to mislead the viewer”. The challenge will be facilitated and overseen by the Partnership on AI’s new
BBC is turning off its iPlayer radio app in favour of BBC Sounds, resulting in public grumblings. BBC Sounds is only available on newer operating systems, leading to criticism that the BBC is not standing behind its mandate to provide information and entertainment to the widest UK audience possible. BBC Sounds, launched in 2018, is an all-in-one audio app that includes streaming radio, podcasts and other audio on-demand programming all in one app. In response to the criticism, James Purnell, BBC director of radio and education, wrote: “Supporting older operating systems is very costly and does not represent good value for money for licence fee payers, given the relatively small number of users we have still using those older operating systems.” Encouraging viewers to adopt BBC Sounds, he said: “The great thing about digital products is they can continually change and improve. They’re never finished, so please, keep on giving us your feedback. I hope you can see how we’ve listened to you over the last few months.” BBC KILLS IPLAYER RADIO APP
EPIC RELEASES UNREAL ENGINE 4.23
Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 4.23, which offers a host of improvements, submitted by the community of Unreal Engine developers on GitHub. New key features include Chaos Destruction, labelled as “Unreal Engine’s new high-performance physics and destruction system”. In other words, a system that relies on Geometric Collections (items to be destroyed), the Fracturing Editor (tool used to define how items are destroyed) and Clustering (tool used to define the varying levels in which to break apart items). The update improves in-camera VFX, enabling filmmakers to achieve final shots live on-set, using LED walls that not only place real-world actors and props in UE4.23 environments, but also light and cast reflections onto them. Real-
time ray tracing has also been improved to support stability and performance, and to support additional material and geometry types. UE4.23 introduces both Streaming and Runtime Virtual Texturing, where large textures are tiled and only the visible tiles are loaded. This, in turn, reduces texture memory overhead for light maps and detailed artist-created textures, and improves rendering performance for procedural or layered materials. Its core also got an overhaul and developers can use the new Unreal Insights system to collect, analyse and visualise data on UE4 behaviour for profiling, helping users understand engine performance from live and recorded sessions. Users can also add their own code annotations to generate trace events.
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