‘Replacing face in porn videos with AI takes off with tool’
A phenomenon that emerged last year, using machine learning to add heads of mostly famous women to porn videos, has gained popularity with the release of a tool that greatly simplifies this process.
The website Motherboard, which also paid attention to the phenomenon last year, now writes that a subreddit was created shortly afterwards where Reddit users share their creations with each other. The tool is called FakeApp and was put online by the user ‘deepfakeapp’ about two weeks ago. This would have contributed to a large growth in the number of videos and gifs with swapped heads.
The maker of the tool tells the site that he wants to make FakeApp as user-friendly as possible in the future, so that users only have to select two videos and press a button to switch the faces. The tool uses a neural network and trains it using faces detected in videos to determine facial expressions, lighting and position.
Earlier, a researcher from the American civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that it would soon become easier to perform such swaps. Now an ethics professor tells Motherboard that there is no doubt that technology will at some point have improved to such an extent that it will no longer be possible to distinguish between real and fake. According to her, this has a ‘destabilizing effect’ and undermines trust and reliability.
The tool is also sometimes used for purposes other than modifying a porn video, according to Motherboard. For example, a user combined a video of Hitler with images of Argentine President Mauricio Macri. In the past, scientists have used artificial intelligence for similar purposes, such as generating realistic mouth movements from audio. Last year, the Defense Cyber Command also expressed its concerns about the manipulation of live video.
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