UCLA builds optical AI that spots deepfakes with nearly 98% accuracy

The prototype handled 15 Celeb‑DF videos simultaneously, delivering 99.86% sensitivity and 95.72% specificity, and maintained 96.13% accuracy when scaled to 18 videos. Adding two diffractive layers boosted performance by about 6.8% without extra power. Tests on Google’s VEO‑3 generated videos showed 94.80% accuracy after minimal fine‑tuning. The researchers say the hardware‑embedded computation makes the detector harder to fool with adversarial attacks and robust to noise, blur, compression and misalignments, positioning it as a high‑throughput first‑line defense for large‑scale content moderation.