Items tagged with deepfake
While there may be funny and impressive deepfakes out there, the technology poses a risk to trustworthy media and public figures. However, companies are working to prevent this sort of thing by developing robust deep fake detection tools. Facebook is the latest to join the group through reverse engineering generative models from a single deepfake. As time goes on, figuring out whether an image is real or fake has become increasingly difficult as new deepfake generative models are created. For example, things could end poorly if the U.S. President were deepfaked into a video where he says something defamatory about another country, which could spark hostilities or even war if not identified. To...
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Deepfakes are beginning to grow in popularity and quality, such as the recent Tom Cruise deepfakes posted to TikTok. Deepfakes raise concerns over what is and isn't real when it comes to various media formats. Subsequently, researchers at the University of Buffalo have developed an AI system that can detect whether an image is real or not with some clever tricks. One of the most popular ways of generating human faces is using a generative adversary network (GAN) model. As the researcher's paper explains, these models can "synthesize highly realistic human faces that are difficult to discern from real ones visually." In fact, the images you see above are what the researchers used, and they came...
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Deepfakes have been around for a few years now, and with each passing day, it seems as though the technology keeps getting better and more lifelike. We saw this last year with a Back To The Future deepfake starring Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland, rather than real Doc and Marty. Now, deepfaker and visual effects artist Chris Ume has taken Tom Cruise’s face and put it on an actor to make a deepfake TikTok series, and it is wild. For those who do not know, deepfakes are AI-generated images or video which can be made to look like a specific person. The way they work, in essence, is by training AI with millions of images of the targeted person. The trained AI is then paired with an...
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Recently, Microsoft patented the creation of an AI chatbot for a specific person, whether they were alive or not. Now, a genealogy company called MyHeritage has partnered with deep learning and image processing company D-ID to create something called “Deep Nostalgia.” This technology can bring a person's ancestors back to life by running a process that upscales, sharpens, and animates any image uploaded. Announced at RootsTech Connect 2021, the world’s largest genealogy conference, “Deep Nostalgia” is a licensed technology that uses D-ID’s AI Face Platform in the backend. Essentially, MyHeritage filmed people for a basic set of motions which could then be paired...
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The proliferation of 'fake news' on social media is not just annoying, it has the potential to influence elections and policies, depending on the subject matter and how believable the content. In an effort to weed out misleading content and "combat disinformation," Microsoft is launching its Video Authenticator tool to detect so-called deepfakes. A 'deepfake' is a type of synthetic media—photos, videos, or audio files—that has been manipulated by artificial intelligence, and can sometimes be hard to spot. That's not always the case. In some instances, deepfakes are creepily obvious. But in other instances, a deepfake can make it seem as though a person said or did something, when...
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has many different uses, including facial recognition and the creation of photo-realistic human faces. However, these various AI applications have not always hit the mark. They often create very basic or unnerving images that fail to bridge the "uncanny valley" gap. A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and City University of Hong Kong have created one of the most advanced image generators to date. DeepFaceDrawing relies on artificial intelligence to transform sketches of human faces into high-quality images. Similar AI frameworks require detailed, well-drawn sketches. DeepFaceDrawing is intended to help those with very little drawing experience....
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Deepfakes have risen in prominence in a few short years. What first started off in the deep, seedy underbelly of the internet for erotica purposes has burgeoned into a vast operation with tinkerers swapping faces of celebrities and politicians, or manipulating video and audio to actually “put words” into a person’s mouths. The latest deepfake to take the internet by storm comes from EZRyderX47 on YouTube. He took an iconic film scene and replaced two of the main characters with “updated” actors that are very popular today. The movie is the 80’s classic Back to the Future, which stars Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. But in...
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Facebook announced it plans to crack down on the proliferation of video content that has been manipulated in certain ways to appear as authentic and intentionally misleading. Also known as "deepfakes," these kinds of videos use artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to superimpose content onto a video clip. The timing of Facebook's decision to beef up its enforcement of misleading videos comes during the early part of a US presidential election year. This is the fourth year of US President Donald Trump serving as the command in chief, and barring an unlikely eviction through an impeachment trial in the Republican-led Senate, he will seek re-election. It is important to note that...
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We've entered an age with technology and software where you can't always believe what you hear, and with deepfakes, we can't always believe what we see. The video below shows what happens when you combine a voice actor who can do exceptional celebrity impersonations with AI-powered deepfake tech, to map the celebrity's face on the head of the impressionist. The result is a video that looks extremely convincing and just plain awesome. The impressionist in this video is Jim Meskimen, and the video is titled "Pity the Poor Impressionist." In the video, he voices 20 different celebrities, some more convincingly than others. He does an excellent Tommy Lee Jones and Robert De Niro as well. The visuals...
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If a new report is to be believed, deepfake technology is about to ramp up the realism factor while making it increasingly more accessible to the general public. While this is an interesting development for people that like to do this sort of digital trickery for fun; in the age of "fake news" it has the potential for creating more upheaval considering how quickly videos can go viral on social media. According Hao Li, a University of Southern California (USC) associate professor of computer science, deepfake videos have the potential to look "perfectly real" within six to 12 months from now. In many cases with current technology, you can often tell that videos have been altered. This...
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Fraudsters are always looking for new ways to cheat someone out of money. A report claims that a company CEO was tricked by scammers who faked the voice of the parent company CEO to get the executive to transfer $243,000 to an external account. The story claims that in March, criminals used commercially available voice-generating AI software to impersonate the CEO of a German energy company with a division based in the UK. The thieves and their deepfake corporate CEO tricked the real CEO of the British energy company into transmitting funds into the claimed account of a Hungarian supplier. Guarantees were given that transfer would be reimbursed immediately. The unwitting company CEO says that...
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A new app rocketed to the top of the Chinese Apple App Store charts over the weekend called Zao. The app launched in China on Friday and allows users to swap their faces with film or TV characters very easily. The app required users to submit a series of selfies to the app where the user blinks, moves their mouth, and makes facial expressions. The app then uses the selfies submitted to realistically morph the person's animated likeness on to popular characters in movies, TV, and other content. The deepfake tech is so good at putting faces onto the bodies of other people that some have been concerned about the potential for misuse. Some who downloaded the app were also very critical of the...
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The developer of the rather disturbing and depraved 'DeepNude' application, that is programmed to "undress" women using machine learning and AI technology, has shut down the operation following a backlash on social media. In a message posted to Twitter, the developer acknowledged that "the probability that people will misuse [the application] is too high." Ya think? How or why the developer may have ever thought otherwise is a mystery. In a lame attempt to justify the app's existence, the developer further stated that the software was created "for user's entertainment" and is "not that great, it only works with particular photos." Here is the full statement on why the app is no longer...
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Researchers at Adobe and UC Berkeley are collaborating on a method to detect facial manipulations made to digital photos in Photoshop. While development is in the early stages, it is part of a broader effort across Adobe to better detect image, video, audio, and document manipulations in today's landscape of fake news. Sometimes it is as easy as pie to detect a manipulated image. Take the photo at the top of this article, for instance—our knowledge of the world tell us that dogs do not normally dress up in suits and walk around like humans, and so that is obviously an altered image. But in other cases, the changes are not so blatant. That in and of itself is not a problem. It is when altered...
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Close your eyes for a brief moment and imagine a world where it's near impossible to tell what is real from what is computer generated. The truth is, we are virtually already there to an extent, and it has enormous implications. We have already seen several examples of spoofed images and videos, known as deepfakes, but apparently artificial intelligence schemes can do a damn good job at replicating someone's voice as well. Researchers from Dessa, a startup based in Toronto that "helps the world's largest and most complex organizations build real-world value with advanced AI," demonstrated this with a believable audio clip of what sounds like Joe Rogan, former host of Fear Factor, stand up comedian,...
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Sometimes the question is not 'can we?' but 'should we?', and whoever decided to make a deepfake video of Steve Buscemi's mug on Jennifer Lawrence completely ignored the latter. The result is one of the most frightening things you'll ever see. Granted, beauty is subjective and in the eye of the beholder. But let us explain. Yes, Steve Buscemi is getting up there in age, his younger days now firmly behind him. He's also a great actor, and perhaps even an underappreciated one—he has an impressive acting resume that includes Reservoir Dogs, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, and one of this editor's favorite TV series, The Sopranos. However, mashing his face onto Jennifer Lawrence is both...
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