With the novel 'COVID-19' coronavirus declared a pandemic, many people are forced to work from home.
This is the main reason why video conferencing apps like Zoom experiences a sudden increase in usage. In meetings where things can get pretty boring, a programmer wanted to spice things up a bit by using deepfake filters for impersonating celebrities
The software for this is called 'Avatarify'. It simply superimposes someone else's face onto the user in real-time, during video meetings.
Available on GitHub for anyone to use, the software was created by programmer Ali Aliev.
To create this Avatarify software, Aliev used the open-source code from the 'First Order Motion Model for Image Animation'.
Published on GitHub, it was developed by researchers at the University of Trento in Italy as well as Snap, Inc..
What it does, is putting a photo of a person to another person in a video, without any prior training on the target image.
Avatarify is a face-swapping technology, just like deepfake. But unlike deepfake, Avatarify that is based on First Order Motion doesn't need prior training of the subject's face.
Deepfake was made famous when people started putting celebrities' faces on porn stars' bodies. While the technology has evolved to become better, deepfake needs to be trained on the face it needs to swap. This requires several (or tons) of images of the person.
Avatarify's algorithm can do the swapping in real-time, and on the fly
There is no doubt that the AI needs to be trained, but here, it was only trained using similar categories of the target.
"I ran [the First Order Model] on my PC and was surprised by the result. What’s important, it worked fast enough to drive an avatar real-time," said Aliev.
"Developing a prototype was a matter of a couple of hours and I decided to make fun of my colleagues with whom I have a Zoom call each Monday. And that worked. As they are all engineers and researchers, the first reaction was curiosity and we soon began testing the prototype."
To demonstrate the tech, Aliev tested it by pretending to join wrong meeting rooms in Zoom, with Avatarify swapping his face with Elon Musk's, the tech serial entrepreneur that is the founder of SpaceX, Tesla and others.
While at first glance, this fake Elon Musk is convincing. And this was why the people in the room reacted in surprise.
But after looking at the details, it's pretty clear that the person is a fake Elon Musk. This can be seen from the eyes and the movements of the head and lips. The quality of the video is also poor.
What's more, Avatarify can only impersonate the face, and not the voice, meaning that people shouldn't be easily fooled.
Motherboard that tested Avatarify, said that the software requires a bit of programming knowledge on the user's side, and require a decent amount of computing power.
Users running Zoom of Skype for video-conference call can use this Avatarify.
"The idea after Avatarify is availability and fun. Certainly it requires a powerful gaming PC to work smoothly, but we think optimization for laptops is just a matter of time," Aliev said. "It just allows people to have some fun while being locked down at home."
ing, tech like this could seem convincingly real.
Read: Coronavirus, And The 'Zoom' Mess That Haunts People At Their Own Home