Deepfakes

A campaign for a new sci-fi film is letting the audience use deepfake technology to insert themselves into the trailer next to Hugh Jackman. It's just one use of a rapidly evolving technology also allowing companies to bring deceased artists back to life.

Computer scientists at the University of Buffalo have just offered a compelling example of what deepfake detection could look like, developing a technology that can spot them with 94 percent effectiveness by analyzing tiny reflections in the eyes.

Genealogy company MyHeritage is putting deepfake technology to a creatively unsettling use with a new feature called Deep Nostalgia. The system animates old photographs of loved ones, turning still portraits into uncanny blinking and smiling videos.

They're known as deepfakes – photos or videos that have been very convincingly manipulated to depict people saying or doing things that they never actually said or did. They're potentially quite the problem, so an experimental new deep neural network has been designed to spot them.

It is now possible to take a talking-head style video, and add, delete or edit the speaker's words as simply as you'd edit text in a word processor. A new deepfake algorithm can process the audio and video into a new file in which the speaker says more or less whatever you want them to.

Using the latest trend in artificial intelligence – adversarial learning – Samsung has demonstrated that it can take a single image of a person and turn it into a talking head. And if watching the Mona Lisa come to life doesn't send chills down your spine, you need to check your pulse.