You have probably read about how a video recording of a person giving a speech can be fake and also, it should be of no surprise that fake celebrity porn is also common, but the latter is limited to still or some doppelgangers. Well, that’s until late last year when someone on Reddit showed that fake celebrity porn videos can be made easily with mind-blowing realism. Of course, by easy, we meant home-brewed, but it is not something a person who is clueless about computers can pull off. Still, what Redditor ‘deepfakes‘ did was so impressive that we should all be very afraid.
Sure, somebody can finally realize their fantasy of seeing Gal Gadot giving a blow job, but this homemade face-swapping technology can also be used in revenge porn and smear videos, to fake things like Photoshop did so convincingly and it could result in destroying someone’s life. Deepfakes have made quite a few fake porn videos of celebrities (and so have others) using a machine learning algorithm, a home computer, and publicly available videos. We heard this newfound ‘hobby’ of some is rather time-consuming because, it may take up to hours to so-called ‘train’ the new face-swapped video to behave exactly, and not turn into some hideous, disfigured monster.
Fake celebrity porn is flourishing at a phenomenal pace after it was ‘exposed’ by the online magazine Motherboard last December. Since then, another Redditor has created an app to allow anyone to create AI-assisted fake porn – even without deep computer knowledge. A Redditor known as deepfakeapp surfaced, bringing along with him/her a home-brewed desktop tool for creating deepfakes, aptly called FakeApp, that a person with zero knowledge of computer programming will be able to create face-swapped videos with even more ease.
Top: original footage from Rogue One; Bottom: 20-min fake done with zero budget.
This development is amazing and at the same time alarming because, as mentioned earlier, it could be used to destroy someone’s life. Then again, not everything is bad about this homemade, face-swapping technology. Case in point: Princess Leia’s face swap in Rogue One was created by deepfake. Deepfake proved that this home-brewed technology can actually do a better job in recreating the young Carrie Fisher, well, at least it appeared to be so in low-resolution gifs. Disregarding the resolution Hollywood demands, it is a start of less plasticky AI faces nevertheless.
Who knows? It could benefit filmmakers who do not have $200 million in funding. Having said that, the advancement in this face-swapping technology is really a double edge sword and also a grim reminder that, as the future draws closer, not everything you see is what it appears to be.
via Motherboard.
