
Pinscreen Deepfake Live Prototype [video] - freediver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imOreIfpzsU
======
lqet
Before anyone is panicking, please remind yourself that whatever medium was
used by humans as a form of communication in the last few thousand years, was
also used for fakes. You only need a half-decent voice actor to pretend you
are someone else on the phone. Fake photographs are as old as photography.
Even the probably most immediate form of interpersonal communication, seeing
another person, can be faked, which is demonstrated by the many Doppelgängers
used by politicians in the past. The power of the house Habsburg basically had
its roots in several imperial documents and bulls faked by Rudolf IV. in 1358
(which was only discovered in the 19th century).

This isn't a new phenomenon that now means that we cannot trust anything
anymore - it's only that the fakes are finally catching up with live video.

~~~
ramraj07
In the past, you needed to put effort to fake things. Of course, people still
exist that believe the moonlanding videos were faked, but their hypothesis
hinges on the government spending extraordinary amounts of money to produce
the fake.

Deepfakes are deeply troubling, because anyone with a computer (a requirement
that's getting optional as well quite fast) can fake any video almost
instantly.

Consider just one sinister motive that's already making women in many
countries cower in fear: if you reject a dude he can just make a deepfake porn
video with you and release it as revenge. What's the equivalent of this in the
distant past? All a guy could have done is "allege" the woman is so-and-so,
which to be sure, probably did ruin some women's lives, but it's almost as if
our society has devolved back to that same Stone age at best then.

And we live in a time when "facts" already don't matter much anymore and
people are just looking to find evidence that supports their claim alone
rather than the truth. To not take this technology seriously, to brush it off
because "sensible" people will still pursue to seek the truth, is the kind of
smug arrogance about questionable tech that has led us to the current overall
shit:sandwich state of affairs to begin with. Let's hope we learn some lessons
at least.

~~~
keiferski
What the original commenter is saying, and what I will agree will happen, is
that the behavior of automatically trusting video as evidence will go away. I
think this is actually a good thing if it encourages people to dig deeper into
the sources of information.

> If you reject a dude he can just make a deepfake porn video with you and
> release it as revenge.

This will be troubling at first, but again in the long run it will likely just
lead to people not taking these sort of videos seriously and interpreting them
as a joke / weird stuff on the Internet. This already essentially happens with
Photoshop and celebrities.

> And we live in a time when "facts" already don't matter much anymore and
> people are just looking to find evidence that supports their claim alone
> rather than the truth

This is how human beings have been since the beginning of time. There is no
"Golden Age of Rationality" that we are exiting.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
> What the original commenter is saying, and what I will agree will happen, is
> that the behavior of automatically trusting video as evidence will go away.

This is doubtful. People still believe in pictures despite it's so easy to
forge. People believe obvious oral lies. Hell, people believe tweets.

The video medium is incredibly powerful, and the damage it can do is huge.

We are going to suffer for this, and most people won't even understand why.

~~~
novaRom
I am observing increasing number of people is now seriously believe in "Moon
Hoax". Definitely more than back in 70-80th. Why is that? Generation of
YouTube? Deliberate propaganda?

~~~
Krasnol
Don't forget the Flat Earth movement.

I don't think anything about that is "deliberate propaganda".

It's just nutjobs gathering and gatherings of nutjobs creating more nutjobs.
It's much easier these days with "social" media.

~~~
overthemoon
What is the actual social impact of the flat earth thing, though? Is flat
earth creating new nutjobs? Does it really have the power to draw from the
ranks of the rational, or is it drawing in people who would have fallen for
something absurd eventually? I'd be curious to find out what social conditions
predispose people to believing it.

~~~
DarthGhandi
They have big conferences about it, as long as no one is hurt all good with
that, but truly doubt that people aren't being hurt by this delusion.

It's an illness that demands rejection of overwhelming proof, it leads down
dark paths, much like how arsonists become murderers these things need to be
cutoff at the stem. There's nothing wrong with that

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jokoon
The human brain is very skilled at recognizing faces, it's the result of
evolution.

While deepfake are high quality, I think most people can notice that it's not
entirely authentic. A deepfake cannot really account for the shape of the
skull, face mimics, face muscles, how the head and jaw move, etc, there are
many things that the human brain works on to identify a face. I'm not really
sure that deepfakes measure and render all those things reliably.

So I'm not really convinced by deepfakes in general. It's mostly a glorified
silicon mask, nothing more: it will trick people if they're far away enough.
Those might be able to fool face recognition softwares, but not humans, even
those who are aware of deepfakes.

~~~
giarc
I think people are mostly able to tell because they are told "this is a
deepfake video of arnold schwarzenegger" (and the technology is early). Now
imagine someone deepfakes a video of a gathering of people taken from across
the room. It purportely shows a politician talking to some constituents and
espousing some whacky ideas. It gets posted and before the politician can
address it, it's already gone viral and there are pitchforks at their door.
The video quality issues are hidden by the fact that it is a grainy cell phone
video in a dimmly lit room with digital zoom enabled.

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FailMore
Can someone explain the difference of this and a typical Instagram / Snapchat
filter? Sorry I'm a bit of a deepfake n00b

~~~
speedgoose
This looks slightly better. It's also a bit more in the uncanny valley in my
humble opinion.

~~~
mkagenius
Another technical difference is deepfake is end-to-end and nobody knows the
exact maths applied to each pixels, while filters are more or less hand
crafted functions.

This particular article is not that impressive, looks like animation to me.

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rusticpenn
The George Bush example was not impressive. I havent seen many DeepFakes, but
is hair generally not part of the equation?

~~~
actimia
I don't think hair is usually included in the faked part. Generally for a
convincing result you would use a base video of someone who has at least some
semblance to the target (including hair).

It is also possible that hair was disabled to get real-time performance for
this (quite impressive) demo.

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kavalg
Hmm, I thought deep fakes consume lots of computational power both at training
and inference time. Is there some tech/science breakthrough here or they have
just scaled it up to more hardware?

~~~
mavhc
I think it's the training of the model that requires most of the time, once
that's done it just needs to decide what to swap with swap.

So I'd expect it to only work on the 1 person in the demo, with the 4 famous
people depicted.

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huling0
though I have to admit this looks like the best in class, there is a public
real time deep fake service already available:
[https://www.aphrodite.ai/](https://www.aphrodite.ai/)

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z3t4
Damnit he skipped the female models. Which I think is the most funny. Thinking
about monetization - what about animal models? Who wouldn't want to look like
a panther...

------
darepublic
Most of the debate here is around evil use cases for this but I just keep
thinking how it will aid in the creation of memes

~~~
etiam
I don't necessarily see the contradiction...

------
owl57
Why did he choose celebrities of different races? Did more similar faces fall
even deeper into the uncanny valley?

~~~
speedgoose
Ethnicity.

------
durpleDrank
OH NO! PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO START USING SKEPTICISM AND CRITICAL THINKING WHEN
WATCHING VIDEOS FROM SHADY PARTS OF THE INTERNET!

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darwinreally
How can we achieve this with what's available in open source world? Or is it
only available as a proprietary system?

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Some recent links and models and code, updated early 2020 Q1

[https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab](https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab)
("More than 95% of deepfake videos are created with DeepFaceLab. DeepFaceLab
is used by such popular youtube channels as Ctrl Shift Face, Sham00k, Collider
videos, VFXChris Ume")

[https://github.com/deepfakes/faceswap](https://github.com/deepfakes/faceswap)

[https://faceswap.dev/](https://faceswap.dev/)

[https://forum.faceswap.dev/](https://forum.faceswap.dev/)

[https://dfblue.com/](https://dfblue.com/)

[https://pub.dfblue.com/pub/2019-10-25-deepfacelab-
tutorial](https://pub.dfblue.com/pub/2019-10-25-deepfacelab-tutorial)

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kavapebumazh
It scares ma a lot!

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cpr
Funny how all this deep fake scare is happening just as important people like
Epstein & cohorts start being brought down...

