Francesco Cavalli

Francesco Cavalli is co-founder and chief operating officer of Sensity AI, an Amsterdam, Netherlands, company that detects deepfake images, video and audio and writes forensic reports for investigators. He runs the company with chief executive Giorgio Patrini.

Teaming Up With a Hometown Friend

By late 2018 Patrini, then a member of a deep learning research group at the University of Amsterdam, had decided to team up with "a longtime hometown friend, Francesco Cavalli," to build deepfake detection software that could scan media in the background the way antivirus software does, IEEE Spectrum reported in 2019. The startup, first known as Deeptrace, became Sensity AI.

Betting Against the 2019 Skeptics

Cavalli says one belief guided the company from the start: "the real emergency will begin once AI is fully democratized, when anyone can generate synthetic media with a prompt and a few clicks." During the first wave of generative AI in 2019, he wrote on LinkedIn, some founders confidently told him, "next year, our generative models will beat any detection model." Six years later, he noted, many of those companies had either shut down or pivoted into detection themselves.

His own view is that "detection would never be solved by a single technology, but by combining diverse, complementary approaches, and pairing them with deep threat intelligence."

Judging Sora Videos for Fast Company

After OpenAI released Sora, Cavalli told Fast Company that even trained eyes struggle. "Even for analysts like me who saw the evolution of this industry, it's really hard, especially on images," he said in the interview, republished by Fast Company South Africa. "The shapes, the colours, and the humans are perfect." He argues that software can still find traces people miss, such as file metadata and discrepancies in background noise. "Even if the human cannot spot anything from the tech point of view, there's always something to investigate," he said, adding that Sensity retrains its detection models as new generators come online.