Deep-fake geography
You might think that the murky world of ‘deep fakes’, in which an image or video involving a person is manipulated to show someone else, would have little to do with geography, but researchers are already preparing for the day it happens to maps and other geographical images. Four researchers from the University of Washington and Oregon State University recently co-authored an article, entitled ‘Deep fake geography? When geospatial data encounter Artificial Intelligence’, that explores the ways in which false satellite images could potentially be constructed and detected. To demonstrate the phenomenon, the team first altered a satellite image of Tacoma, Washington, interspersing elements of Seattle and Beijing, and making it look as real as possible. They then compared 26 different image metrics to determine whether there were statistical differences between the true and false images. Such differences were registered on 20 of the 26 indicators.
It's just the start of a discipline that's likely to grow. Geographic information science underlays a whole host of applications, including mapping software, national defence systems and autonomous cars – not things that you want manipulated. Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to extract and analyse geospatial data but, as the researchers identify, it could also potentially be used to fabricate GPS signals, fake locational information on social media posts, fabricate photographs of geographical environments and more.