Photo and video editing can bring a lot of differences into things, by bringing imagination to life. But what if Artificial Intelligence (AI) can do all that, like putting 'Wonder Woman' star Gal Gadot into a porn video?
The implications are indeed terrifying.
First of all, celebrities have a huge number of fans. Those people idolize their work and their appearance, their love life and also their professional attitudes in front of cameras. With that fact, the inevitable happens. Idolizing went further, putting the internet full of celebrities doing NSFW things.
However, most of the time, the video editing for those contents don't really use the power of CGI like Hollywood, resulting a distinguishable look that don't really appeal viewers.
With AI that has been proven to aid humans in many things, computers can put that fantasy a bit closer to the real thing.
What the AI does, is editing videos creating a close approximation, of what a face-swap should be, and allows viewers' imagination do the rest.
Shown on a clip below, is the Israeli actress Gal Gadot, famous for portraying Wonder Woman in the DC Extended Universe. But that is not her body, and not at all her face.
Gal Gadot's face was edited by AI to a porn star's body. The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source codes. Close to reality, but still far from perfect for anyone who looks closely to the video. She resembles Gal Gadot for sure, but no, it's not her at all.
This is because the algorithms didn't track the face correctly, and there's an uncanny valley effect at play. There is also a box that occasionally appeared around her face where the original image peeks through, and her mouth and eyes don't really line up to the words the actress is saying.
But at a glance, it seems to be the real her.
The AI was created by 'deepfakes', a Redditor who revealed himself as a programmer with an interest in machine learning. Without using CGI, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like Keras with TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.
With the tool, deepfakes combined Face2Face algorithms to swap recorded videos with real-time face tracking.
To compile Gal Gadot's face, deepfakes said that he used Google image search, stock photos, and also YouTube videos. He also mentioned that he also used an algorithm similar to one developed by Nvidia researchers that uses deep learning to, for example, instantly turn a summer video into a winter one.
Using AI, the deep learning process consists of networks of interconnected nodes autonomously run computations on the input data. In deepfakes' case, the algorithms are trained on porn videos and Gal Gadot’s face.
After the AI has learned enough, the nodes were able to complete the particular task themselves.
"I just found a clever way to do face-swap," he said, referring to his algorithm. "With hundreds of face images, I can easily generate millions of distorted images to train the network. After that if I feed the network someone else's face, the network will think it's just another distorted image and try to make it look like the training face."
As the moment of introduction, besides Gal Gadot, deepfakes has posted porn videos featuring the faces of Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Taylor Swift and Aubrey Plaza on Reddit, each with varying levels of success.
While this is a breakthrough of what an AI can do, it certainly pose a lot of problems. Porn stars are used to having their work spread around free to tube websites, without permission. But for Gal Gadot's and others, the application is a violation of personal boundaries, and this could mean trouble.
But here deepfakes said that he considered the ethical implication of this technology. He is trying to show that how easily accessible those materials are, and with the availability of open-source code, anyone with a working knowledge of machine learning could use to create serviceable fakes.
"Every technology can be used with bad motivations, and it's impossible to stop that," he said. "The main difference is how easy [it is] to do that by everyone. I don't think it's a bad thing for more average people [to] engage in machine learning research."
In February 2018, Reddit has shut down /r/deepfakes, the subreddit where people collaborate to produce the disturbing faceswapped pornography. This was because the forum has turned itself into a mix of terrible and wonderful, filled with tutorials and Q&As that introduced non-technical people to video-manipulation techniques.