
Avatarify lets users run realtime deepfakes on live video calls - adenner
https://www.inputmag.com/tech/open-source-program-will-let-you-run-deepfakes-on-live-video-calls
======
JimDabell
It would be interesting to see how far you could get using deepfakes as a
method for video call compression.

Train a model locally ahead of time and upload it to a server, then whenever
you have a call scheduled the model is downloaded in advance by the other
participants.

Now, instead of having to send video data, you only have to send a
representation of the facial movements so that the recipients can render it on
their end. When the tech is a little further along, it should be possible to
get good quality video using only a fraction of the bandwidth.

~~~
teraflop
This is a minor plot point in Vernor Vinge's excellent SF novel _A Fire Upon
the Deep_.

One of the premises of the novel's universe is that computational power is
generally absurdly plentiful, but communications bandwidth over interstellar
distances is not. Most communications are in plain text (modeled after USENET)
but in some cases, "evocations" are used to extrapolate video and audio from
an ultra-compressed data stream.

The trouble, of course, is that it's not very obvious what aspects of the
image you're seeing are real, and what aspects were dreamed up by the system
doing the extrapolating.

~~~
cheez
A main premise of the Fear the Sky trilogy as well but solved a different way.
Machines representing various political factions from the home planet are
uploaded with AI that mimics them emotionally and politically for all intents
and purposes. I really enjoyed this book.

~~~
luhem7
Eh, I personally enjoyed the series, but I wouldn't recommend anything beyond
book 1. Book 2 is ok. Book 3 really spoiled the series for me because of the
inconsistent behavior if the main character. (Keeping it vague to avoid
spoilers)

~~~
cheez
Same. Notice I said "the book" while mentioning the trilogy ;-)

------
forgingahead
Actual Github repo for this called Avatarify:
[https://github.com/alievk/avatarify](https://github.com/alievk/avatarify)

Original repo code that Avatarify is based on called First Order Model:
[https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order-
model](https://github.com/AliaksandrSiarohin/first-order-model)

Short video demonstrating First Order Model:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUfJOQKdtAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUfJOQKdtAk)

------
qznc
Voice fake has been done already as well.

[https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-
Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning)

~~~
Der_Einzige
As someone whose tried this repo extensively with politican sound clips (I
wanted to troll buddies on discord) - it kinds blows. Don't get me wrong -
it's really neat but the results are far less good than one may expect.

Sometimes it almost works, and then it's just totally absurd. Long pauses,
voices that don't sound compelling, total failures on female voices. It's
great in theory but it showed me that there's a ton of work to be done with
voice cloning.

Props to the author for using UMAP to seperates voices though

Also lol at the demand being so high that there are open issues of people
offering to _pay_ others to install this on their machine. Freelancing
opportunities show up in the strangest of places...

~~~
forgingahead
Real Time Voice Cloning certainly has iffy output, but it's probably the most
popular because it provides the easiest plug-and-play experience with even a
simple UI to get started.

The author says he's working on a more polished toolkit called Resemble.AI,
but I've never tried it. [https://www.resemble.ai/](https://www.resemble.ai/)

There's certainly a market out there for just beautifying existing repos to
making it easier for non-scholars to get going. Even having a Colab Notebook
ready to click-and-start is quite powerful -- probably a big reason why First
Order Model (source paper to the original story) got so much traction so
quickly.

~~~
egfx
See [https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai](https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-
ai) for another one with an on-site demo.

------
bawana
I ran this on ubuntu 18.04. It took a little work to get around a small bug
that will be squashed when the v412loopback library gets officially rebuilt
but here is a solution
[https://github.com/alievk/avatarify/issues/37#issuecomment-6...](https://github.com/alievk/avatarify/issues/37#issuecomment-614503547)

anyway, on a 4930k at 4.5 ghz i am seeing reasonable performance(~30fps) but
minimal cuda utilization(titan pascal). The biggest issue is that you need a
well lit, stationary face for it to properly map features of the jpg you are
using to substitute for your face. Also the jpg needs clearly identifiable
features. Even then, the amount of facial expression is subdued (for example
closing your eyes is not properly processed).

I seem to recall software about 10 years ago where you drew line segments of
corresponding features on 2 images and the jpg was then mapped onto the video.
It was more accurate and expressive than this is but did require time to set
up.

------
Waterluvian
The way that the mouth and eyes move, but that the rest of the face is pretty
static, is actually really charming to me.

It betrays that it's a fake, which I think makes it easier to be a fun joke.

~~~
scarface74
That’s simple. If you are trying to fool someone....

“My internet speed is very low. I know the video is choppy”.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Which is the line taken by the guy who made his own video call bot shown in
social media recently.

[https://redpepper.land/blog/zoombot/](https://redpepper.land/blog/zoombot/)

------
sytelus
This is the best application of deep fakes I have seen! If someone was selling
deep fakes for StarTrek/StarWar, it would be hot cake among crowd here, except
for too many Kirk and Picards might be seen in meetings.

~~~
jessaustin
More meetings should definitely start with arguments about who gets to use
which avatar. "I only took Riker because my boss is on the call!" "Geordi is
already taken; you have to be Wesley!"

------
mikece
Sounds like it would be with a few minutes of fun on a daily status call
during these work-from-home days of quarantine. For the time being the
goofiest it’s gotten was someone using a virtual webcam that allowed for
green-screen and looping video of the Max Headroom background... Which reminds
me, though slightly off topic, if there’s virtual webcam software whose sole
point is to keep a log of all of the applications using the built-in camera or
mic. That might be useful.

------
blackdogie
I’m sure we will see more and more of this. One question is when they get so
good, how can people figure out that it’s a deep fake or a real human? Will we
have captchas for videos soon ? _sigh_

~~~
bloopernova
My opinion on this is that we will "soon" have "trusted" webcams that create
some sort of signature in each frame. In other words, a way to say "this is
what the camera saw, guaranteed".

Probably something that would be built into phones and laptops first.

Of course, we know that messing with such a datastream would be easy for us,
but for enterprise users (think liability) and news organizations it could be
a real boon.

~~~
BenjiWiebe
That's when you point your camera at a screen.

~~~
toni
Will the "trusted" webcam manufacturers then attempt to detect any screen
curvature?

------
ravenstine
I seriously wonder how this will affect online dating. Not that I've dated in
quite a few years, but even if I wanted to, I wouldn't go back because last
time I did, the proliferation of obnoxious Instagram filters and photoshopping
made the experience unenjoyable. Fake people aren't appealing. I would bet
that the ease at which the average person can deep fake will only make matters
much worse. There will always be a demand for Tinder, Match, Bumble, etc., but
they will be strictly used for hookups.(I know some will say that's what they
are already for, but people are always making that argument for every dating
app, thus I can't take that opinion very seriously) Actual dating will have to
either go back into being more in-person or require a third-party to handle
photography.

~~~
postingawayonhn
Why do you think people would use fake pictures on mass. If they wanted to
create a profile with pictures that aren't themselves then surely it's easier
to just steal someone else's?

~~~
ravenstine
Because they already do, to some extent. Now this is my own experience and
intuition, but I would say that at least 15% of people's photos on dating apps
are doctored in some way. I know some might dispute this, but I've seen enough
questionable artifacts in such photos that I believe quite a few of them are
artificially flattering. This isn't even including those puppy-face photos.
And yes, already there are people who outright steal other people's photos.
I've been on many dates where the person looked nothing like the photos.

There are a few problems with these kinds of fakery. If you are simply
touching up photos to make them more flattering, that takes a lot of work that
the average person doesn't want to do. There's AI that can make you look
sexier, but said AI is often inconsistent, and isn't that good at arbitrarily
modifying features. People who might want to use photos of people who aren't
them may have a moral hangup from using someone else's likeness, and that
prevents them from going ahead with it.

Deepfake technology solves both of those problems. You can use it to change
your eyes, your hair, the shape of your face, consistently at every angle, and
possibly I real time. More people would feel comfortable using a likeness that
isn't theirs because they don't feel like they are stealing, especially if
they have no intention of meeting people in real life.

I'm not saying that all or even most people would use this technology in
dating, but it would require only an appreciable portion of an audience to be
dishonest to cause many people to throw in the towel.

These are just my crazy theories, so maybe I'm way off base. Soon we will have
deepfaking that is easy to use and requires minimal training, and I believe
they will be used often and eventually be normalized in society.

~~~
folkhack
> These are just my crazy theories, so maybe I'm way off base.

You absolutely are not. From my experience I'd say about 30%+ of the pictures
that were posted to OkC 2+ years ago were doctored in some major way (I'm a
straight man so this anecdotally only applies to women's pictures).

Using your "own" picture that's doctored is easier to justify for these folks
vs. just using someone else's. Also, these people are still going on real-
world dates, so if they look like an _entirely_ different person they're
taking on more risk vs. using weird Instagram filters.

> I'm not saying that all or even most people would use this technology in
> dating

I think most wouldn't employ this sort of deceit like you posit, as MOST of
people I went on dates with were totally operating in good-faith.

BUT - there will be a huge chunk of people that are happy to do the mental
gymnastics to justify posting a fake picture of themselves.. and those people
are exhausting.

Protip: _NEVER_ meet up at a bar initially because it's expensive when this
happens (AND IT DOES!!!). ALWAYS do an informal coffee. It is easy to keep
coffee to a 15-20 minute thing and not get on the hook for at-minimum 2x
$15-20 drinks. If you chose a coffee place, do so an hour or so before
lunch/dinner in walkable distance to a nice restaurant. This gives you both
the opportunity to keep the date going if it's a positive experience =)

------
odnes
All the new mobile banks seem to do their ID verification/KYC using video
selfies. Interesting to consider whether deepfakes are being used in wild to
fool these systems and commit fraud.

~~~
perf1
They try to mitigate this. They ask you for example to move your hands around
your face and bend your ID card.

~~~
james_s_tayler
Just apply the same technology to mitigate their mitigation. Arms race all the
way down.

------
k__
Finally a solution for daily standups.

I can pay someone to attend meetings all over the world, by just impersonating
me.

------
searchableguy
I am just waiting for someone to build a deep_nude_realtime_zoom plugin so I
can finally tell people that we should take digital security, privacy and
identity seriously.

~~~
buboard
That would give everyone an alibi and make them care even less about privacy.

~~~
searchableguy
I really wonder what government agencies will do with deepfakes. Will they
doctrine evidence like they do now at a greater scale?

They already distribute CP, encourage people to believe in Russian
conspiracies, troll, encourage violence and the list goes on. So fucked up
that we think it is normal.

------
mdeligoz
Hey guys! I'm one of the founders of Impressions, the first mobile deepfake
app on a phone. Try it out and give us your thoughts. Right now it's out for
IOS but Android is on route. Here's our website
[https://impressions.app](https://impressions.app)

~~~
jsjohnst
Very weak output I’ve seen so far. Trying another before passing judgment, but
honestly this is so obviously fake output so far.

Edit: now done three images, all well lit face, no dramatic movements, and the
output is just terrible.

~~~
mdeligoz
It really depends on lots of factors. Lighting, angle, face type, the
celebrity you choose and your facial hair. If you're squinting your eyes for
example, you won't get decent results. DM me your ID from under settings so I
can give you credits to play with.

------
rkagerer
I wanted to play with this, but ran into an error upon starting a Miniconda
prompt after a fresh install of Miniconda3 on Win7:

    
    
        ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'conda'
    

It's triggered by this line in conda-script.py:

    
    
        from conda.cli import main
    

Same thing happened when I tried installing Anaconda instead. Any suggestions?

\----

EDIT: To get this to work, I had to remove a PYTHONHOME environment variable
lingering from an old (but still valid) Python install (see
[https://github.com/conda/conda/pull/9239](https://github.com/conda/conda/pull/9239)),
and _set CONDA_DLL_SEARCH_MODIFICATION_ENABLE=1_ to avoid mkl_intel_thread.dll
issues.

Leaving my comment here for anyone else who gets stumped.

~~~
jcims
I had a different set of challenges on Windows 10

\- Miniconda installer suggests you _don 't_ add it to the path, so i didn't
but install_windows.bat assumes you do

\- There is something with windows permissions happening with the installer,
where it can't access the network and can't run the conda activation process.
I didn't spend any time figuring this out, i just execute dthe command from
the (short) batch file one by one and it worked fine.

\- i had to add 'fomm' to PYTHONPAT in order for it to find sync_batchnorm.

------
deegles
I would love to use this with an avatar of myself so that I don’t have to get
dressed up for calls!

------
pm_me_ur_fullzz
Nice, now I can pass my Binance verification with fake KYC more easily

------
zaroth
Any hope of being able to run this on a machine with an AMD GPU?

------
gumby
Finally, the solution to the “haircut problem” with videoconferencing. My gf
spends 3-4 hours in meetings every day and is quite concerned about this.

------
system2
I wish deepfake could get the mouth part right. It's been the biggest
challenge since the first CGI face animations and is always the giveaway.

~~~
Lex-2008
Good answer to the question asked in a different comment regarding detecting
such fakes!

------
noworriesnate
This is pretty funny. I wonder, how hard would it be to use tech like this to
make it look like you are looking the camera “in the eyes”?

~~~
smartinspereira
Apple is doing this on FaceTime with the latest iOS. Pretty neat feature,
makes Video calls more personal.

~~~
jlokier
Microsoft has it too:

[https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/03/microsofts-ai-powered-
eye...](https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/03/microsofts-ai-powered-eye-gaze-
tech-is-exclusive-to-the-surface-pro-x/)

Seems they've been working on it since 2002:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/eye-gaze-
co...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/eye-gaze-correction-
for-video-telecommunications/)

------
zengid
Ok so how about an app that does the opposite of this, and can prove that the
video/audio data hasn't been tampered with since it was created? I don't think
it would need much more than public/private key encryption, and a blockchain
ledger to record every-time the data was transmitted from one user to another.
Thoughts?

~~~
0x62
How would you prevent against a deepfake program presenting itself as a
camera? From your applications perspective, it's raw data directly from the
camera but there's no guarantee the camera is just a camera.

~~~
zengid
The "secure video stream" would probably need to be baked into the hardware,
like Apple's Secure Enclave [https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-
enclave-over...](https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-
overview-sec59b0b31ff/web)

------
ctoth
And the Cam industry was never the same.

------
m3kw9
Theoretically you can deepfake yourself but then be not at the place, just
pipe in your voice. Prob be accomplished by linking it to some Twilo API

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Why would you do remote work even more remotely?

~~~
crispyporkbites
So you can go to the office ;-)

------
skanga
This is a posting about an article (inputmag) about another article (vice)
about a git repo. Wow.

------
Andrex
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes."

------
rglullis
81 comments at the moment and not one single mention of Infinite Jest?! How
disappointing...

~~~
jessaustin
I read that over 20 years ago; could you explain the relevance? deepfakes or
something similar would have fit right in with "the entertainment" etc., but I
don't recall that happening...

In general I find that adding an oblique reference is more appreciated on HN
than simply name-dropping a particular fictional work.

~~~
rglullis
In the book there is a long passage about how video calls were initially very
popular, but after a while people realized that with video calls they were
supposed to be looking to the screen all the time and how that led to
unnecessary anxiety - e.g, on the telephone you could talk on the phone while
clipping your nails, on the video it would never happen.

There is also a part where people had to start worrying about their looks on
the screen, so that led to a cottage industry of virtual make-up, stand-ins to
pose in front of the camera while you could stay away, etc. After everyone
realizes that no one is actually in front of the camera anymore, people start
going back to regular phone calls.

------
dawnerd
I don’t understand why everything thinks they have to be on video for every
single meeting. I never turn on my webcam. It makes no difference to the
outcome of the call.

~~~
redhale
A lot of information can be transmitted through non-verbal communication (e.g.
facial expressions). Do you look at the faces of other people on the call with
you who do have their cameras turned on? If so, why?

~~~
dawnerd
Nope since someone is usually presenting their screen anyways.

------
101404
From the site's text:

> _and plenty of Americans and Russian 's willing to use whatever means
> necessary to ensure Trump gets re-elected_

That is not what the Russian attacks are about.

In fact, the maker of the site seems to have fallen for the attacks himself.

The attacks are about _dividing_ society. Radicalizing people towards the left
and right. The "Trump haters" are just the same as the "Trump fanatics".

The author, by implying that the "bad guys" are just one site, is playing into
the hands of the Russian trolls. Its exactly what the attacks are trying to
achieve.

~~~
DFHippie
Both things can be true. They don't really care for Trump personally, they
just want to sow discord, but Trump is a great way to sow discord.

Non-Russian-aligned intelligence agencies were pretty unanimous in their
assessment that Putin was trying to get Trump elected _and_ that they troll
both extremes of the political spectrum.

~~~
101404
Wasn't there an investigation that found no evidence on that?

------
ourmandave
Couldn't I just wear an N-95 mask?

Once the pandemic is over, I'm never using Zoom again anyway.

~~~
scarface74
You’re never working remotely or do you plan to use a different app/service?

~~~
antongribok
And good news... this works with other services, not just Zoom.

