Donald Trump covers Rick Astley: Behold the Deep Fake Revolution

[Justin]

This video blows me away:



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.

[Jim B]

Someone had way too much time on their hands.

[Gman]

Stresses my intolerance for autotune.

...but I've seen the president's likeness used in worse messaging.

[Irving]

Someone had way too much time on their hands.

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.

[Justin]

Bingo.

[Gman]

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?

[Irving]

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.

[Justin]

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/

[Gman]

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]

LOL, I see they slipped Obama in as the bartender ...