Amazon Web Services Inc. is joining a Facebook Inc.-led industry initiative to combat “deepfakes” with artificial intelligence.

Deepfakes are the umbrella term for videos in which a person’s face and sometimes voice are superimposed on another individual. The phenomenon is fueled partially by the increasing accessibility of AI software, which can manipulate footage with far greater precision than most humans. The spread of deceptive content has led to concerns about the potential of deepfakes to be weaponized as a misinformation tool. 

Facebook’s Deepfake Detection Challenge, which launched in September, is a $10 million contest meant to foster the creation of machine learning models for catching AI-manipulated clips. The social network essentially wants to fight fire with fire. The initiative is also backed by Google LLC and Microsoft Corp., AWS’ top competitors in the cloud market, as well as a number of universities.

AWS will provide $1 million worth of cloud infrastructure to participating researchers over the next  two years. Each applicant will be eligible to receive up to $10,000 in credits. In addition, the cloud provider will offer access to experts from its Amazon ML Solutions Lab who can assist with model development. 

“These Amazon experts help AWS customers utilize machine learning technology to build intelligent solutions that address some of the world’s toughest challenges like predicting famine, identifying cancer faster and expediting assistance to areas hard hit by natural disasters,” ML Solutions Lab head Michelle Lee wrote in a blog post Monday evening. “Experts will be paired with Challenge participants to provide assistance throughout the competition.”

AWS has a clear incentive to back the contest. The cloud giant is a major provider of AI development tools and there’s a risk bad actors might abuse its products for deepfake creation. Plus, on top of aiding the fight against deceptive videos, AWS’ contributions could help it win favor among policymakers: Fellow tech giants such as Google are already facing pressure from Congress to do more about the spread of deepfakes.

The cloud provider will join the contest’s steering committee as part of its commitments. Lee wrote that AWS will host some of the research files used in the challenge, including potentially the secret 4-petabyte dataset that the organizers will employ to evaluate AI models submitted by researchers. 

Image: Facebook