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Spotting fakes is just the start of a much bigger battle. Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge You may have seen news stories last week about researchers developing tools that can detect deepfakes with greater than 90 percent accuracy. It’s comforting to think that with research like this, the harm caused by AI-generated fakes will be limited. Simply run your content through a deepfake detector and bang, the misinformation is gone! But software that can spot AI-manipulated videos will only ever provide a partial fix to this problem, say experts. As with computer viruses or biological weapons, the threat from deepfakes is now a permanent feature on the landscape. And although it’s arguable whether or not deepfakes are a huge danger from a political perspective, they’re certainly damaging the lives of women here and now through the spread of fake nudes and pornography. Hao Li, an expert in computer vision and associate professor at the University of Southern California

A problem with the battery pack was causing short-circuits. Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Leading Chinese EV startup NIO has recalled nearly 5,000 of its ES8 electric SUVs after multiple reports of battery fires surfaced over the last few months in China. SUVs built between April 2nd, 2018, and October 19th, 2018, are included in the recall and will need to have their battery packs replaced. It will take two months to swap out battery packs on all of the affected vehicles, the company says. The issue is with the battery packs themselves, according to an investigation performed by NIO with the help of “industry experts,” the supplier of the pack, and “other concerned parties.” They found that a module in the battery pack was, in some cases, pressing up against a voltage sampling cable in the wiring harness. Over time, this repeated contact wore down some of those cables, resulting in short-circuits that led to a handful of fires. NIO SAYS IT WILL COMPENSATE ANY OWNERS WHO

The resulting fakes could be used to shame, harass, and intimidate their targets. The DeepNude app creates AI fakes at the click of a button. A new AI-powered software tool makes it easy for anyone to generate realistic nude images of women simply by feeding the program a picture of the intended target wearing clothes. The app is called DeepNude and it’s the latest example of AI-generated deepfakes being used to create compromising images of unsuspecting women. The software was first spotted by  Motherboard’s  Samantha Cole, and is available to download free for Windows, with a premium version that offers better resolution output images available for $99. THE FAKE NUDES AREN’T PERFECT BUT COULD EASILY BE MISTAKEN FOR THE REAL THING Both the free and premium versions of the app add watermarks to the AI-generated nudes that clearly identify them as “fake.” But in the images created by  Motherboard , this watermark is easy to remove. (We were unable to test the app ourselves as

The startup gets a helping hand. Image: Kitty Hawk Kitty Hawk, one of the flying car startups backed by Google founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, announced that it’s partnering with Boeing to develop its semi-autonomous flying taxi. Specifically, Kitty Hawk will work with Boeing on its two-seater Cora flying vehicle, which it hopes to one day use for a semi-autonomous flying taxi service. After a flurry of announcements last year that included the two-seater Cora, the single-seater Flyer, as well as a partnership with Air New Zealand, Kitty Hawk has been much quieter in recent months. Its aim is for Cora to one day provide a flying taxi service that can reportedly be summoned with an app. The plan is for the vehicle to not have a pilot on board; instead, it will be flown mainly by autopilot systems, with supervision from a human pilot situated remotely. It sounds like getting this system to work safely could be a key element of its partnership with Boeing since the company’s N

Recently announced investments apparently aren’t enough to get things back up and running. Photo: Faraday Future Sputtering electric vehicle startup Faraday Future has fired dozens of employees who have been on unpaid leave for months, including manufacturing workers hired to staff the company’s factory in Hanford, California,  The Verge  has learned. The workers received benefits during this furlough, which started in late 2018, and it had already been extended once already. But the newly-fired employees will see those benefits expire on June 30th, according to termination paperwork provided by a former employee who was granted anonymity due to a nondisclosure agreement with the company. In addition, Jeff Risher, Faraday Future’s vice president of product, technology, and IP strategy, left the company earlier this year,  The Verge  has learned. Risher came to Faraday Future from Tesla, where he served as deputy general counsel and chief IP counsel for two years. Risher also spe

‘Finally, you can take a selfie without yourself’. Street photography, without the people.  Credit: Bye Bye Camera Bye Bye Camera is an iOS app built for the “post-human world,” says Damjanski, a mononymous artist based in New York City who helped create the software. Why post-human? Because it uses AI to remove people from images and paint over their absence. “One joke we always make about it is: ‘finally, you can take a selfie without yourself,’” Damjanski tells  The Verge. The app costs $2.99 from the App Store, and, fair warning here, it’s not very good — or at least, it’s not flawless. The app is slow and removes people with a great deal of mess, leaving behind a smear of pixels like an AI hit man sending a message. If you’re looking to edit out political opponents from your Instagram, you’d be better off using Photoshop. But if you want to mess around with machine learning magic, Bye Bye Camera is good fun. Two examples of ByeBye Camera’s mistakes — removi