Pinscreen Deepfake Live Prototype [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imOreIfpzsU

by freediver • 6 years ago

142 60 6 years ago

lqet• 6 years ago

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.

numlock862• 6 years ago

You only need a half-decent voice actor to pretend you are someone else on the phone.

You can even digitalize this part already. All you need are 5 seconds of recording and a pre-trained model in the desired language/accent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sR1rU3gLzQ

saurik2• 6 years ago

Right... but the point is that you _don't_ need fancy neural networks, you _only_ really need someone with an actually not that uncommon skill.

scarejunba• 6 years ago

Very cool. Thanks for sharing. I wonder why the warbling is easier to detect in the male voices. They sound like a computer. But very cool advancement.

mikorym• 6 years ago

I'm glad to see this point being made fairly often.

I see the "base reality" debate in a similar situation. Base reality could be the same thing as a religion, where the "god" is the system operator [1]. That way, you are "only" as scared of multiple levels of reality as you are of religion. But perhaps more importantly, that way you have 2000+ years of debate and reflection on the topic.

[1] Not my idea.

philbarr• 6 years ago

Reminds me of this story from WW2 [0]. I'm sure I saw a documentary about this but that's the only reference I can find.

"In late December 1942 Grimson and Allan Morris walked out of the camp with a group of German servicemen but were recaptured 2 days later, when they showed more courtesy than was expected from a German Officer. The prisoner forgery department had produced the documents necessary for the escape and the German uniforms to go over their civilian clothing. Both Grimson and Morris had again noticed that they had near doubles serving as officers in the German guard company who they impersonated and both had lain in wait for 3 nights fully disguised in their German uniforms waiting for the right moment when the two clones attended the show. Outside the wire they changed into civilian clothes disguised as foreign workers, walking to Sagan station and catching a train to the outskirts of Leipzig before being caught."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grimson

ramraj072• 6 years ago

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.

keiferski3• 6 years ago

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.

mbel2• 6 years ago

With deep fakes easily available I believe the pornographic video material ultimately will have the same weight as a rumor, it's somewhat true for photos today. We definitely need a common way to propagate trusted information, but keeping videos as absolutely trustworthy is not possible anymore.

amelius• 6 years ago

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

But the woman in this example could take the same video and put the faces of a thousand other people on the person in the video.

overthemoon2• 6 years ago

I challenge anyone worried about how facts don't matter to people anymore due to the tech bubble/fake news/propaganda campaigns to prove they ever really did.

belorn• 6 years ago

"What's the equivalent of this in the distant past?"

There are so many versions depending what time and what place. If its an elder in ancient times then what they say is the truth. If its in a caste society then the truth is determined by your blood. In chivalry, truth is based on reputation. 19th century truth is written in a book. 20th century it was written in the paper. World war 2 is a period where truth was what was said by leaders, both political and scientists. Post world war 2 until 21th century and truth was anything said on the TV (in many places a single channel).

With the exception of the caste system, I would say that there is a need for a healthy balance between trust and distrust. It also seems that balance generally will occur after a while, but not before a lot of damage happens. Deep fake in that sense is not ushering in a new dark age, but it will likely take a bit of time before people find a balance in how to perceive video evidence.

pvinis• 6 years ago

because anyone with a computer

How is that different from anything else nowadays? That's what computers do for us.

Making calculations, decrypting text, generating art, developing a software.

All of these used to be harder and more manual and time-consuming. Now, anyone with a computer or a phone and an app can do these things way easier, and I'm sure there are better examples I failed to think of.

It only makes sense that even the "bad" uses of a computer will be benefitted by computer progress.

sharot4• 6 years ago

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.

Are you truly suggesting here that the government would never make a fake video about a moon landing because it would cost too much to make this video?? So instead they sent humans to the moon and brought them back safely to earth because that's all their budget would allow?

prox• 6 years ago

One rule there was in old times you always had 2 witnesses with you for any important event to vouch for. Reasoning was that it is a lot more difficult to do any trickery when more people are involved.

Just because we scaled a lot of services in a digital network means our trust services need to adapt as well.

keiferski3• 6 years ago

Similar things happened in Russia and the Ottoman Empire - people claiming to be so-and-so, heir to the throne. As with anything else, if you are/aren't validated by society + the "gatekeepers of power", it doesn't really matter how good/bad your fake evidence is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Dmitry

giarc2• 6 years ago

In 1358 you could fake your identity and communicate with a handful of people. In 2020 you can fake your identity and communicate with 7.5 billion people at once. I think there is a difference.

kavapebumazh• 6 years ago

It scares ma a lot!

FailMore• 6 years ago

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

speedgoose2• 6 years ago

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

mkagenius• 6 years ago

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.

jokoon• 6 years ago

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.

mbel2• 6 years ago

While it's true that there are some artifacts, I think that they can be mitigated with some tricks like: avoiding sudden head movements by the actor or artificially decreasing the quality of the video. Low quality photos of big foot entertained people for years.

I generally agree though that with time we will learn to see red flags like this and treat video as probably fake.

giarc2• 6 years ago

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.

danlugo92• 6 years ago

Actors with similar skull shapes might be used for more convincing deep fakes.

kavalg• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

jorgemf• 6 years ago

Training yes, but for inference a commercial GPU can do that at 14fps with a small latency (very noticeable in the video)

darwinreally• 6 years ago

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

Erlich_Bachman• 6 years ago

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

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://faceswap.dev/

https://forum.faceswap.dev/

https://dfblue.com/

https://pub.dfblue.com/pub/2019-10-25-deepfacelab-tutorial

rusticpenn• 6 years ago

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

actimia• 6 years ago

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.

z3t4• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

I don't necessarily see the contradiction...

owl57• 6 years ago

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

speedgoose2• 6 years ago

Ethnicity.

huling0• 6 years ago

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/

cpr• 6 years ago

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

durpleDrank• 6 years ago

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

Pinscreen Deepfake Live Prototype [video]

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