DEEP FAKE digital manipulation technology is now weaponising satellite images of the Earth, a military expert has chillingly warned.
The digital age has characterised the 21st century, with computers now at the heart of every aspect of our lives. Digitisation comes with near limitless benefits, from the ease of AI automation to having the world's information at our fingertips. But the digital age also arrived with dangers, the latest of which is Chinese deep fake technology, powerful enough to trick even AI into believing doctored images are real.
Deep fake technology first came to prominence via manipulated videos causing embarrassment for politicians and celebrities.
But another of deep fake's applications could be far more nefarious.
Military experts are waking-up to the reality about a new variant of deep fakes, involving altered satellite images of Earth, Defense One has reported.
It comes as social media giants, researchers and other experts have been working to outsmart deep fake videos.
According to Todd Myers, of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, China is leading the way in using generative adversarial networks (GAN).
This is an emerging technology capable of tricking AI into seeing objects in maps or satellite photos that do not exist.
Mr Myers said: "The Chinese are well ahead of us. This is not classified info.
At scale, it could be used to confuse military analysts into making decisions on the basis of these fake images.
Mr Myers offers the example of the enemy duping your computer-assisted imagery analysts into reporting that a bridge crosses an important river at a given point.
He added: "So from a tactical perspective or mission planning, you train your forces to go a certain route, toward a bridge, but it's not there. Then there is a big surprise waiting for you."
GANs are capable of learn from large data sets to recognise patterns and produce new data.
GANs operate by playing a pair of neural networks against each other, with one neural network working to discern what is in the image.
The other network, which has been trained on large amounts of data, then checks the other network's decisions to make sure it is correct.
Many experts now rely on GANs to detect objects and understand which images are real and which are not, Defense One reports.
For example, Chinese scholars once used GANs to identify infrastructure seen in satellite photos.
But a growing fear is that open-source images relied upon by experts and the general public alike can now easily be doctored to make objects appear to be where they are not, a vice-versa.
Mr Myers added: "Forget about the Department of Defence and the intelligence community.
And Andrew Hallman, deputy director of CIA for digital innovation, told Defense One: "We are in an existential battle for truth in the digital domain.
"That is, again, where the help of the private sector is important and these data providers.