A joint research team from Soongsil University and Chung-Ang University has developed a technology to disrupt lip synchronization in deepfake videos that use artificial intelligence (AI) to make a person's lip movements match an audio track. Soongsil University said Tuesday that the team, led by professor Choi Dae-sun of its AI Security Center and professor Kwon Jun-seok of Chung-Ang University, developed the technology, dubbed MUTE. According to the team, MUTE is the first technology to disrupt lip synchronization in deepfake videos using audio protection alone. The paper, titled “MUTE: Multi-Level Alignment Uncoupling Against Talking-Head Exploitation for Voice Protection,” was accepted for presentation at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2026, one of the world’s leading AI conferences. The study was conducted as part of a research and development project supported by the Personal Information Protection Commission and the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA). The research team included doctoral student Kim Dong-hyun, master’s student Kim Seung