You can now deepfake yourself into a celebrity with just a few clicks
You can now deepfake yourself
into a celebrity with just a few clicks
Become
anyone from Billie Eilish to Keanu Reeves in a matter of minutes.
The bar for creating deepfakes has undoubtedly been lowered
since the technology first emerged in late 2017. Until now, developing such a
video required specific knowledge, patience, and high-end computer hardware
that few possess.
But what if anyone could create a decent-looking deepfake right
from their mobile device? A new app for the iPhone known as Impressions is aiming to do just that.
The app, which launched in select countries in late February
before its global release last week, lets users transform themselves into an
array of celebrities with just a few clicks.
The project officially began in August of last year, Impressions
CEO Murat Deligoz told the Daily Dot. The app works by uploading your short
clips to Impression’s cloud servers, which utilize powerful graphics cards to
carry out the deepfake process, before returning the completed videos to your
phone.
“We built the architecture in this manner because phone hardware
is not yet capable of doing this type of intensive processing,” Deligoz noted.
The San Francisco-based company uses proprietary machine
learning algorithms designed for speed to create your deepfake in just minutes.
And while the quality will not rival videos created by the technology’s most
prolific users, the clarity of Impressions’ deepfakes, when created under ideal
conditions, can be impressive.
Impressions is not the first deepfake app on the market, but
does provide more features than others. Chinese app ZAO, for example, only allows users to add
their own face to the bodies of actors from select movie scenes, while
U.S.-based deepfake app Doublicat only lets users add their faces
to animated GIFs.
Deligoz
says his company is constantly training its algorithms to learn the unique
intricacies of celebrity faces from thousands of photos and videos. At the
moment, Impressions is releasing three to
four new faces every week.
Its
latest additions include actors Eddie Murphy, Matthew McConaughey, and Ryan
Reynolds. The app even includes young and old versions of actors like Al Pacino
and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Young artists such as Ariana Grande, Rhianna, and Selena Gomez
can be found alongside late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. Acting icons
include Brad Pitt, Bruce Lee, and Leonardo DiCaprio, as well as Tom Cruise, Tom
Hanks, and Will Smith.
As with
any tool that scans a user’s face, concerns over privacy are present.
Impressions states that original videos, including those that you up upload of
yourself, remain on the company’s servers as long as the user keeps the
deepfaked-version in the app.
If a user chooses to create a deepfake, they can save a copy of
the video to their phone’s photo gallery and then delete the original in the
app. This will cause the copy on Impression’s servers, the company says, to be
“immediately” deleted.
Impressions says that it plans to develop “deepfake detections
models” in the future based on users’ source videos. Deligoz stresses that the
feature will be opt-in, meaning users will be asked to provide consent.
Aside from being able to upload and transform videos of
yourself, users can also upload clips of others.
In experimenting with the app, the Daily Dot uploaded an
8-second clip of Justin Bieber and attempted to turn the pop star into Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves.
Each video took less than three minutes to create and produced
fairly impressive results.
Testing
out a tool that has automated the deepfake process, allowing anyone to create a
video in just a few clicks. I turned Justin Bieber into Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Keanu Reeves. Not bad for taking less than 3 minutes.
As
with any technology, advancements will undoubtedly move the app forward in the
near future. Deligoz says Impressions’ data science team is actively
researching ways to optimize the deepfake process to ultimately let the
conversion take place on a user’s phone.
Impressions also plans to introduce a lip-sync feature in its
next update before eventually releasing an Android version of the app as well.
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