A rather seedy trend is taking hold in certain parts of reddit at the moment revolving around a powerful new app that is allowing just about anyone to create fake celebrity porn videos.
The tool, called FakeApp, uses an artificial intelligence-based technology called machine learning and essentially allows people to face swap the celebrities with the porn stars in the videos.
While the videos clearly aren’t perfect, they’re still realistic enough to cause some concern over how fast this technology is developing. While 99% of the content being created is entirely NSFW, its creator did post this example where they were able to recreate the CGI scene from Rogue One but using their own software. The top is the original, and the bottom is the homemade version.
The app and its creator (known as deepfakes) were first revealed after Motherboard got the chance to speak to them anonymously back in December.
Back then deepfakes was simply experimenting with the technology but there is now a tool that anyone can download along with comprehensive instructions on how to use it.
When he was asked why he created the videos by The Verge, he responded: “You could say that my motivation is obsession, with porn or imaginary internet points or problem solving.”
Now before you think anyone can do this, there are some important caveats. Firstly the processing power required to literally face swap a person in a moving video is considerable, as such it requires a significantly powerful computer. More powerful than most people have in their homes.
Secondly, this is not quite at the stage where just any of us can download it, pick any video and immediately have the faces swapped over. There are some complex requirements that need to be fulfilled including the type of video being used.
We’ve seen examples of how machine learning can be used to control faces in video before, with this video from researchers at the Technical University of Munich standing out as clear examples.
It goes without saying that the implications here are huge, not only can you manipulate existing videos of people so that they conform to say what you want them to, but you can now essentially photoshop people’s faces directly onto live video in such a way that is increasingly realistic.
With much of this technology open source it is available for anyone to use, edit or improve as they wish.