'Deepfake' AI can turn the Mona Lisa into a convincing real person
'Deepfake' AI can turn the Mona Lisa into a convincing
real person
Olivia Rudgard, US TECHNOLOGY REPORTER, SAN
FRANCISCO 23 MAY 2019 • 6:31PM
AI can now turn the Mona Lisa into a real life person
with just one picture.
A paper published by a Samsung artificial intelligence
lab in Russia shows the ability to convincingly turn artworks and celebrity
photographs into moving images.
The technology raises the prospect of convincing
"deep fakes", videos showing politicians and even people who have
died saying things they never said, created just with still images of their
faces.
The paintings were animated using the facial expressions of
a real person, while celebrity photographs of figures such as David Beckham
were turned into video using footage of them speaking on a different occasion.
The researchers, based at the Samsung AI Center in
Moscow, also performed the effect on images of Marilyn Monroe and Albert
Einstein, using the moving facial features of other people which was then
"mapped" onto their faces, a technique known as
"puppeteering".
Other models have required a large set of images in order
to create a fake video, but Samsung's method can do it with just one, though
the effect is more convincing if more images are used.
In the Mona Lisa example, a video published by the same
team shows that the animated painting looks slightly different depending on the
person used as the moving image source.
"We show that such an approach is able to learn highly realistic
and personalized talking head models of new people and even portrait
paintings," the authors said.
Concerns have been raised about the potential uses of
such technology in the wrong hands, and the ability of the public to be able to
distinguish between real videos and those which have been created in order to
influence public perception of a politician.
Last year US lawmakers warned that such faked videos
could be damaging to national security.
Researchers and even journalists have created convincing fake videos of
figures including former US president Barack Obama and Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
In one case a speech given by Mr Obama was
"mapped" onto images of Mr Putin, making it look like they were his
words.
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