My brother swore he could spot deep fakes by looking at the ears, so I tested him

My brother Dave thinks he's some kind of deep fake detective after watching a YouTube video about ear shadows. Last week I found this video of a politician giving a speech where the ears looked weird, blurry around the edges. I showed it to him and he immediately said fake, no doubt. Turns out it was a real clip from a press conference, the camera just had a bad focus. He got all defensive and said the lighting must have changed or something. But it got me thinking, are there actually any solid eye tricks that work every time? I've seen people swear by the blink test or the lip sync thing but I'm not sure what to trust anymore. Has anyone here found a trick that actually holds up against the good fakes?

3 comments

3 Comments

simon_carr4d ago

It's the "pleather" thing where I gotta jump in. Real pleather is actually a brand name, like Kleenex. Most fake leather is just vinyl or polyurethane. But that's a different argument. Anyway, about the ear trick. The problem is people think there's one magic tell that works on everything. The blink test is useless now because they fixed that years ago. It's like saying you can spot a stolen car by looking for a certain type of license plate. By the time the general public knows a tell, the people making the fakes already patched it.

the_holly4d ago

Oh man, this is so me with literally everything I think I'm good at. I once swore I could tell a real leather jacket from fake by the smell and ended up bragging about a pleather one I'd owned for years. But honestly, the ear thing is funny because I tried that too after seeing a tik tok and realized I was just staring at people's blurry ears at the grocery store for no reason. I think the problem is that the really good deep fakes are made by people who already know all the 'tells' and fix them, so the tricks only work on sloppy fakes from like 2021. My advice is to just assume everything is fake and be pleasantly surprised when it's real.

julia_carter614d ago

Is that like saying we should all walk around with tinfoil hats until proven innocent? At this point I'm just waiting for my toaster to ask me to verify I'm not a deep fake.