Clearview AI, the company already famous—and infamous—for scraping billions of photos off the web, is setting its sights on a new menace: AI-generated faces. As reported by FedScoop, the firm says it’s building a detection tool aimed at separating real human images from synthetically generated ones, promising delivery by late 2025.
But let’s be real: the stakes are sky-high here. Deepfakes are no longer just internet gimmicks; they’re filtering into politics, finance, even family WhatsApp chats.
A few days ago, AP News covered how Moldova’s election was drowned in AI-driven disinformation—fake websites, fake articles, fake everything. If even seasoned journalists struggle to tell what’s real, what chance do the rest of us have?
Clearview insists its new tool won’t turn into a live surveillance machine, but critics aren’t buying it. The ACLU has long argued that the company’s practices push us toward a surveillance state.
Honestly, can you blame people for being skeptical? This is a firm whose tech has already been used by the FBI, ICE, and even foreign governments.
There’s also the messy technical side. Deepfake detectors aren’t perfect—they can misfire, creating so-called “ghost identities” in facial recognition systems, as experts told FedScoop. That problem could ripple into law enforcement or border checks in dangerous ways.
And to make things even murkier, Axios just reported on YouTube’s rollout of likeness-detection for creators, showing platforms are scrambling too. We’re seeing a wave of competing solutions, but none are airtight.
Here’s my two cents: Clearview entering the deepfake wars feels like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. On one hand, their vast database could give them an edge.
On the other, their track record doesn’t exactly scream “trustworthy steward of digital truth.” It’s a fascinating, uneasy twist in the AI story—one that’ll likely shape how much faith we put in what our eyes see online.