View Full Version : Donald Trump covers Rick Astley: Behold the Deep Fake Revolution
This video blows me away:
https://vimeo.com/346762373
Basically someone used a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) software package to do a deep fake face swap, as well as voice swap, of The Donald (and others) for this music video.
The effect, and the audio, isn't perfect, but speaking as someone who spent a fair amount of time in the video production world, I can tell you that doing this kind of face swap, even five years ago, would have taken a small, dedicated team hundreds of hours to pull off.
Someone had way too much time on their hands.[Dunno]
Stresses my intolerance for autotune.
...but I've seen the president's likeness used in worse messaging.
Someone had way too much time on their hands.[Dunno]
You're missing the point. The point is that it doesn't take a lot of time, or money, or skill. The barriers to entry on this type of thing are rapidly crumbling.
I was showing my wife a CGI video last night that was done extremely well. I posed the question, "What happens when someone creates a malicious work of fiction that never happened...and the populace gets wound up in it via social media?
I was showing my wife a CGI video last night that was done extremely well. I posed the question, "What happens when someone creates a malicious work of fiction that never happened...and the populace gets wound up in it via social media?
That's been happening for years via general propaganda. People don't need to see something to think that it happened. I'm not trying to diminish this, because it is scary, and bad stuff WILL happen. But it's not new.
What is new is the fact that this can now be done using a laptop from Best Buy, some free, open-source software, a reasonably-sized video reference library for the software to chew on, and basically no skills whatsoever in digital compositing or special effects.
In a similar vein, here's a website that, on the fly, uses AI to autogenerate photographs of people who don't exist.
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
What used to be the act of motion picture and special effects studios (and governments) is going mainstream. "I'll have to see it to believe it." has gone where it was never expected a couple of generations ago.
Aloha_Shooter
07-18-2019, 15:31
LOL, I see they slipped Obama in as the bartender ...
Zundfolge
07-18-2019, 16:03
LOL, I see they slipped Obama in as the bartender ...
That was for Bill and Joe.
(lets see who gets the reference)
I was just talking about this tech yesterday, after tracking it for about a year. This isn't even a good example of it. I've seen some that are almost visually indistinguishable.
It really is a SERIOUS problem that will be hitting us soon, and it's a double edged sword. Both the audio and video can be deepfaked. Based on my experience, I think we're about two years away from common android/iphone apps that can deepfake substantially well.
I also give it about two years before around 15-25% or even more of all video/audio/photos in a courtroom setting is deepfaked. This is a huge issue politically (false accusations of assaults, accusations of racism, etc.) and this is a double edged sword, because it also provides the perfect scape goat for people who do get caught red handed. The people who will be most successful when this stuff advances are the skilled manipulators / smooth talkers, AKA the shits that actually do the things they were accused of doing, but now can talk their way out of it, and their cult of personality will believe it. (It was deepfaked!) The reaction of normal people, when faced with "video evidence" of them raping a poodle or bashing their child with a vase or whatever, will be judged by about 3/4 of the public to be disingenuous or "acting strange", because unfortunately, nobody has experience dealing with this kind of manipulation in their entire lifetimes so a normal persons reaction will always be strange.
This is so, so powerful in the wrong hands. And soon, it'll be in everyone's hands. We'll see it in heavy use in divorce cases - especially the faked audio. There will be "expert witnesses" you could pay $3,000 to say some adverse evidence was deepfaked, but really, once people hear/see it, it sticks in their mind whether or not they believe it, and no matter what your expert says, it still sounded like you.
Someday... much more distant in the future, I think a good portion of society will just become entirely distrustful of everything they see that it may as well be the 1700's again, where people relied on an individual's reputation alone for the trustworthiness of their statement. And... that's not a good thing either.
ETA: There will also be no consequence for using deepfakes in a political or courtroom setting even if you are caught in 99.99% of cases. There's no consequence today for perjury or forgeries in a courtroom setting 99.99% of the time.
BushMasterBoy
07-18-2019, 16:24
I'm waiting for the "Storm Area 51 Event" footage. The suspense is killing me.
Tom Segura fans have been messing with this stuff a lot and messing with Garth Brooks. Here is one of the many face swaps with Tom's face on Brooks' head. This one is interesting because when they are played side by side it's easy to pick up the lack of expression in Segura's face (left) compared to the real on the right. BUT, if you were just to see the one on the left, it's a lot more difficult to pick up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvcihXyuL2w
Here is an audio one of Rogan that is still a little clunky, but the audio is getting pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWK_iYBl8cA
Again, the impression is that these ones being passed around on things that people are spending hardly any time on at all.
Then there is this guy's work. These are idealized, but the visuals are still pretty incredible. This guys puts these animations out the very NEXT DAY after the fight happens, so it's not like it takes a lot of time.
**this video has some language**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctT-OZqsB4A
OK, I'll make a stab at one point I think is being missed. Or that I missed seeing.
There are a bunch of people out there that have so little real life experience that they think what they experience on their electronic stuff is real. If they see something on electronic media it is real to them because they have so little real life to measure it against. They exclaim it to be Photoshopped!! because it doesn't look like what they have experienced on some game. They are expert on something because they have never driven or seen a car, or gun, or airplane, wild animal or much of any wild nature in motion to compare it to.
The matrix is more real to them than real life.
More human than human.
Relevant XKCD:
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/photoshops.png
I was just talking about this tech yesterday, after tracking it for about a year. This isn't even a good example of it. I've seen some that are almost visually indistinguishable.
It really is a SERIOUS problem that will be hitting us soon, and it's a double edged sword. Both the audio and video can be deepfaked. Based on my experience, I think we're about two years away from common android/iphone apps that can deepfake substantially well.
I also give it about two years before around 15-25% or even more of all video/audio/photos in a courtroom setting is deepfaked. This is a huge issue politically (false accusations of assaults, accusations of racism, etc.) and this is a double edged sword, because it also provides the perfect scape goat for people who do get caught red handed. The people who will be most successful when this stuff advances are the skilled manipulators / smooth talkers, AKA the shits that actually do the things they were accused of doing, but now can talk their way out of it, and their cult of personality will believe it. (It was deepfaked!) The reaction of normal people, when faced with "video evidence" of them raping a poodle or bashing their child with a vase or whatever, will be judged by about 3/4 of the public to be disingenuous or "acting strange", because unfortunately, nobody has experience dealing with this kind of manipulation in their entire lifetimes so a normal persons reaction will always be strange.
This is so, so powerful in the wrong hands. And soon, it'll be in everyone's hands. We'll see it in heavy use in divorce cases - especially the faked audio. There will be "expert witnesses" you could pay $3,000 to say some adverse evidence was deepfaked, but really, once people hear/see it, it sticks in their mind whether or not they believe it, and no matter what your expert says, it still sounded like you.
Someday... much more distant in the future, I think a good portion of society will just become entirely distrustful of everything they see that it may as well be the 1700's again, where people relied on an individual's reputation alone for the trustworthiness of their statement. And... that's not a good thing either.
ETA: There will also be no consequence for using deepfakes in a political or courtroom setting even if you are caught in 99.99% of cases. There's no consequence today for perjury or forgeries in a courtroom setting 99.99% of the time.
This is all relevant.
There was an article I read not too long ago where there was an academic who was proposing that public figures in the future will have to engage in constant life logging, e.g. that they'd have to have either a device or a smartphone app that would constantly be recording their GPS coordinates and probably also logging audio and video on a continual basis such that they would have a continual record that could be admissible into court as a way to have an available alibi in the event of a deep fake-bolstered accusation.
The article highlighted how creepy having to log your life would be, but of course they failed to address the fact that such a logging app or device just presents another attack vector for an adversary.
Bailey Guns
07-18-2019, 18:37
I'm totally ignorant of how this works...aside from what I've just read in this thread. I've heard of it recently but haven't given it much thought.
So, if someone fakes a photograph or video or whatever, is there a way to tell it's been faked? Like the Garth Brooks video above. Instead of just singing the song, someone has a fake Brooks saying all kinds of horrible things in say a private setting. Obviously it wouldn't work while he was on stage. But is there some type of analysis that could be done to tell if the audio/voice was not really Brooks, but a faked Brooks?
I'm totally ignorant of how this works...aside from what I've just read in this thread. I've heard of it recently but haven't given it much thought.
So, if someone fakes a photograph or video or whatever, is there a way to tell it's been faked? Like the Garth Brooks video above. Instead of just singing the song, someone has a fake Brooks saying all kinds of horrible things in say a private setting. Obviously it wouldn't work while he was on stage. But is there some type of analysis that could be done to tell if the audio/voice was not really Brooks, but a faked Brooks?
I forget who, but some company is saying they are working on a program that will be able to detect doctored photos. Just something I've recently heard.
On a related note, but one that no one really cares about or is willing to talk about, I guess porn has been having this problem for a while now where people take celebrity faces and put them onto porn stars. I think the term Deep Fake might have even been coined from those videos, but not sure.
Relevant XKCD:
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/photoshops.png
One picture is worth a thousand words.
Thanks for posting that.
One picture is worth a thousand words.
Thanks for posting that.
It's a fake.
I'm totally ignorant of how this works...aside from what I've just read in this thread. I've heard of it recently but haven't given it much thought.
So, if someone fakes a photograph or video or whatever, is there a way to tell it's been faked? Like the Garth Brooks video above. Instead of just singing the song, someone has a fake Brooks saying all kinds of horrible things in say a private setting. Obviously it wouldn't work while he was on stage. But is there some type of analysis that could be done to tell if the audio/voice was not really Brooks, but a faked Brooks?
As I understand it, at a high level, it kind of works like this:
You take two sources of video; one that has the body you want to superimpose the face onto, and another video of the person who's face you want to use.
In the software, you do some level of stipulating in each video to track the faces in it.
Then you run the software, which uses inbuilt artificial intelligence to take the face from the source video, and then read and match things like the angles, lighting, facial expressions, and mouth movements to the target video.
From the little I know, the more video you have, and the higher quality of the source face, the better it works. Also, the longer you let the software chew on the video, the better the result.
If you contrast this with the traditional way of doing something like a face replacement for a movie, that process is much more involved, and requires you to do things like hire actors who are willing to wear makeup dots on their face that can be used to do facial tracking. You then have to build a highly detailed 3d model of the face you want to superimpose, give it convincing lighting and skin textures, which is a time consuming art form in and of itself. You then have to animate that face, usually by hand, or maybe with some automated tools you can streamline the process somewhat. Facial animation is also, in and of itself an art form.
Going this route is very time consuming, requires a lot of specialized 3d animation and compositing software, and the labor of specialized animators spending weeks on end, often for a result that isn't completely convincing. The best example of the traditional sort of face replacement work that I've seen was the work done for the Star Wars: Rogue One movie where they brought back Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fischer.
The thing with the AI stuff is that a lot of it is self-learning. A few years ago, Google made kind of a stir when they released their Deep Dream AI image analyzer, and it generated a lot of really trippy images. This new deep fake stuff is the outgrowth of a lot of that sort of initial work done with AI-based image analysis.
Frankly, I only see the quality getting better from here on out.
Just grow a beard to throw "them" off...
http://youtu.be/27GEXva5Xrs
[Coffee]
JohnnyDrama
07-18-2019, 21:03
There was a scene in "Running Man" where the game producers fabricate a scene about past "winners". What do you know, the future as depicted by Hollywood is here...
Aloha_Shooter
07-18-2019, 21:17
There was a scene in "Running Man" where the game producers fabricate a scene about past "winners". What do you know, the future as depicted by Hollywood is here...
More like the future as envisioned by Philip K. Dick is here ...
I'm totally ignorant of how this works...aside from what I've just read in this thread. I've heard of it recently but haven't given it much thought.
So, if someone fakes a photograph or video or whatever, is there a way to tell it's been faked? Like the Garth Brooks video above. Instead of just singing the song, someone has a fake Brooks saying all kinds of horrible things in say a private setting. Obviously it wouldn't work while he was on stage. But is there some type of analysis that could be done to tell if the audio/voice was not really Brooks, but a faked Brooks?
In all likelihood, experts could determine if something was faked probably for the next decade or so. But therein lies the problem. If the user can't tell it's faked, they rely on manipulated sources who proclaim to be "experts".
E.g.
Liberal sources report the deepfaked anti-conservative video to be real... some* people believe it's real.
Liberal sources report the legit video from their "guy" of whatever time to be deepfaked, people believe it's deepfaked.
Conservative sources report the deepfaked liberal video to be real... some* people believe it's real.
People already believe the obvious fake crap today, because we are so polarized and drowning in dissonance. This lets the respective camps build up impenetrable bubbles of insanity. Who are you going to believe, your talking heads or theirs? Both are going to inject their respective bias into their analysis. And at the end of the day, it still looks, acts, and talks like the person.
Bailey Guns
07-19-2019, 06:26
That's got the potential to be some pretty scary stuff. I can see this being harmful in a lot of ways.
Lucky for us the government would never abuse this sort of technology...
http://danzigercartoons.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/dancart3735.jpg
In all likelihood, experts could determine if something was faked probably for the next decade or so. But therein lies the problem. If the user can't tell it's faked, they rely on manipulated sources who proclaim to be "experts".
E.g.
Liberal sources report the deepfaked anti-conservative video to be real... some* people believe it's real.
Liberal sources report the legit video from their "guy" of whatever time to be deepfaked, people believe it's deepfaked.
Conservative sources report the deepfaked liberal video to be real... some* people believe it's real.
People already believe the obvious fake crap today, because we are so polarized and drowning in dissonance. This lets the respective camps build up impenetrable bubbles of insanity. Who are you going to believe, your talking heads or theirs? Both are going to inject their respective bias into their analysis. And at the end of the day, it still looks, acts, and talks like the person.
On a deep psychological level, it doesn't matter if you are consciously aware of whether something is fake or not. Once you've seen it, the instinctual part of your brain accepts it as truth regardless of whether or not your conscious brain knows it's fake. This is why movies can evoke emotional reactions in us, even though we know the characters are all fictional people portrayed by actors.
So, once this becomes a thing, even news reports that start off with "KXYZ has verified that the following video of Senator so-and-so having relations with a farm animal is in fact a deep fake. In case you haven't seen it, here's the video."
Your brain will still have a visceral reaction, and it won't matter if what's in the video is real, you'll still get sick just at the thought of the Senator, who's career is now DOA.
On a deep psychological level, it doesn't matter if you are consciously aware of whether something is fake or not. Once you've seen it, the instinctual part of your brain accepts it as truth regardless of whether or not your conscious brain knows it's fake. This is why movies can evoke emotional reactions in us, even though we know the characters are all fictional people portrayed by actors.
So, once this becomes a thing, even news reports that start off with "KXYZ has verified that the following video of Senator so-and-so having relations with a farm animal is in fact a deep fake. In case you haven't seen it, here's the video."
Your brain will still have a visceral reaction, and it won't matter if what's in the video is real, you'll still get sick just at the thought of the Senator, who's career is now DOA.
Exactly. The reason for this is we aren't as conscious as we'd like to think we are, most of our apparent decision making is almost entirely done subconsciously. In FMRI studies, they can "see" the decision you're going to make (studied on selections of very simple items) up to eleven seconds before you even know you're going to make that decision. Our stream of consciousness is truly the tip of the iceberg and mostly an illusion.
So even if you consciously know something is faked, that logical determination only exists at the last 5% of the mental railroad tracks. Your brain circuits are always doing most of the mental processing under the hood and incorporating that imagery subconsciously in many tasks.... and it processes it as if it's true. You may not realize this as the "memory" may not enter your stream of consciousness, yet the consideration of it has already entered your decision making on a subconscious level, eliminating your ability to consciously reason it away.
A big reason why people are so easy to manipulate.
Doesn’t even look like trump. Poorly done
The issue isn't that the effect is perfect; it's clearly not.
The issue is that, less than two years after this technology was developed, anyone with a laptop can, or at least soon, will be able to generate videos of quality that's good enough.
Also, good enough is just going to continue to get better.
Here's a new one that's much better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrG-REWdV6A
http://youtu.be/kjI-JaRWG7s
http://youtu.be/Gz0QZP2RKWA
I like this one. The Theo Von as Randy Savage is ridiculously good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhGsm2bNzF4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_6Tumd8EQI
Good example of significant quality improving. 5 at a roundtable - Tom Cruise, Jeff Goldblum, Ewan McGregor, Robert Downey Jr, George Lucas.
Also funny, at times. Robert's base actor is a little too pudgy, maybe, but damn.
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