philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Samsung deepfake AI could fabricate a video clip of you from a single photo

A Samsung artificial intelligence lab in Russia developed the technology, which was detailed in a paper earlier this week.

Here's the downside: These kinds of techniques and their rapid development also create risks of misinformation, election tampering and fraud, according to Hany Farid, a Dartmouth researcher who specializes in media forensics to root out deepfakes.

"Following the trend of the past year, this and related techniques require less and less data and are generating more and more sophisticated and compelling content," Farid said. Even though Samsung's process can create visual glitches, "these results are another step in the evolution of techniques ... leading to the creation of multimedia content that will eventually be indistinguishable from the real thing."

In the paper, Samsung's AI lab dubbed its creations "realistic neural talking heads."

The system starts with a lengthy "meta-learning stage" in which it watches lots of videos to learn how human faces move. It then applies what it's learned to a single still or a small handful of pics to produce a reasonably realistic video clip.

Unlike a true deepfake video, the results from a single or small number of images fudge when reproducing fine details. For example, a fake of Marilyn Monroe in the Samsung lab's demo video missed the icon's famous mole, according to Siwei Lyu, a computer science professor at the University at Albany in New York who specializes in media forensics and machine learning. It also means the synthesized videos tend to retain some semblance of whoever played the role of the digital puppet. That's why each of the moving Mona Lisa faces looks like a slightly different person.

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-ai-deepfake-can-fabricate-a-video-clip-of-you-from-a-single-photo/