Stanford Director Agrawala featured speaker at Data on Purpose Symposium

Maneesh Agrawala, Director of the Brown Institute at Stanford, presented “Digital Media Manipulation and Society” at the recent Data on Purpose 2021 conference hosted by the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR).

“Video has become a primary medium for communicating ideas, making sense of information, and sharing new narratives. While advances in technology – including video-recording capabilities embedded in our mobile devices – have made it easier to capture video, raw media rarely tells a compelling story. And some of the tools that are designed to reduce the effort required to edit and produce high-quality video of talking heads can also be misused to produce “deep-fake” videos.”

In his talk, Agrawala describes recent projects that aim to facilitate the creation of video content and culture as well as explores the potential for the misuse of these same technologies.  He demonstrates how the text-based editing tool can manipulate videos to add or delete words seamlessly in a speaker’s speech.