Detection of deepfakes, videos where fraudsters put words into politicians’ mouths, or show celebrities in false, compromising situations, is core to the Sensity team’s mission to educate the public about these forms of misinformation.

Back in September 2019, Sensity revealed that 14,000 deepfakes were circulating the web. “At the time, we were the only company able to gather concrete data on misuses of synthetic media – recordings generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) – in the world,” says Founder and CEO Giorgio Patrini. Since then, the number of deepfakes has continued to grow with the company detecting 81,000 visual threats since May 2019.

The company offers individuals and organisations detailed visual threat intelligence tracking of these deepfakes from hundreds of sources across the open and dark web. “People who sign up to the free service can see – almost in real time – data about deepfakes across the world, and upload files to be analysed by our tools,” explains Patrini. Their work has attracted further funding to develop the service and will be commercialising the service further with paid-for services.