New “deepfakes” face-swapping concerns

The practice of swapping faces in a video, (dubbed “deepfakes” or “deepfaking”), was once the domain of highly-skilled CGI experts. But now, thanks to new deep-learning AI software, anyone can create one of these simply by specifying a handful of source videos on YouTube.

The code above, linking to 6x John Oliver videos and 8x Jimmy Fallon videos was all that was needed to produce the following video. The results are so convincing, and easy to achieve, that concern is raising over the dangers of face swapping; framing innocents, propagating fake news, and damaging the credibility of video evidence forever!

A few videos of both the swapper and swappee, and a computer with a powerful GPU, is all that is needed to produce these “deepfakes”. No video editing, special effects or CGI skill are necessary, opening up this technology to anyone who wants to use, or abuse it.

You can no longer believe everything you see!

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