community is how to start proactively
to improve these detection tools,”
says Sam Gregory, director of
programs strategy and innovation at
WITNESS, a human rights organiza-
tion that in part focuses on ways to
distinguish deepfakes. Making tools
for detection is important because
people tend to overestimate their
ability to spot fakes, he says, and
“the public always has to understand
when they’re being used maliciously.”
Gregory, who was not involved in
the study, points out that its authors
directly address these issues. They
highlight three possible solutions,
including creating durable water-
marks for these generated images,
“like embedding fingerprints so you
can see that it came from a genera-
tive process,” he says.
The authors of the study end with
a stark conclusion after emphasizing
that deceptive uses of deepfakes
will continue to pose a threat. “We,
therefore, encourage those develop-
ing these technologies to consider
whether the associated risks are
greater than their benefits,” they
write. “If so, then we discourage the
development of technology simply
because it is possible.”
—Emily Willingham
Lego Robot with
an Organic “Brain”
Learns to Navigate
a Maze
The neuromorphic computing
device solved the puzzle by working
like an animal brain wouldIn 1997 Carver Mead lectured on an
unusual topic for a computer scien-
tist: the nervous systems of animals,
such as the humble fly. Mead, a
researcher at the California Institute
of Technology, described his earlier
idea for an electronic problem-solving
system inspired by nerve cells, a
technique he had dubbed “neuromor-
phic” computing. A quarter of a
century later re searchers have
designed a carbon-based neuromor-
phic computing device— essentially
an organic robot brain—that can learn
to navigate a maze.
A neuromorphic chip memorizes
information similarly to the way an
animal does. When a brain learns
something new, a group of its
neurons rearrange their connections
so they can communicate more
quickly and easily. As a commonsaying in neuroscience goes, “Neu-
rons that fire together wire together.”
When a neuromorphic chip learns, it
rewires its electric circuits to save the
new behavior like a brain does to
save a memory.
The idea of brainlike computation
has been around for a while. ButPaschalis Gkoupidenis of the Max
Planck Institute for Polymer Re-
search in Mainz, Germany, and his
neuromorphic research team are
pioneers in crafting this technology
from organic materials. To build their
chip, the researchers used long
chains of carbon-based molecules Sean Gladwell/Getty ImagesNEWS