Deep Fakes

What is deep fake & How does it work?

Deep fake is when a piece of footage which has been edited/manipulated by artificial intelligence by someone with the similar likeness/features. For example there could be a footage of someone talking, deep fake would then be taking that footage and manipulating it to make the person say or do something different.

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How is it believable?

As incredible as deep fakes can be it could also be really devastating, if someone was supposed to use it to benefit them for example in the political agenda (pretending to frame someone or make someone say something they shouldn't).

What makes deep fakes believable is that if you show a clip to someone that's deep faked, they may not be able to realize and think it's completely genuine deceiving the viewer.

Not every single deep fake flawless though, it is possible to expose a deep fake. When breaking a deep fake down frame by frame it could be noticeable. The way you'd be able to distinguish this could be down to many reasons, an example blurry frames, mouth on the character may not be moving correctly when talking; furthermore if the actor's face aren't similar to the footage you'd like to deep fake it could look uncanny. 

Examples

In the world of visual effects deep fakes are used frequently, a extremely good example of this would be Fast & Furious. After the passing of Paul Walker who plays one of the leading roles in the franchise. Paul's brother 'Cody Walker' was then called to replace Paul and the deep fake technique was then used to replace Cody's face with Paul's.