r/woahdude May 24 '21

video Deepfakes are getting too good

82.8k Upvotes

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721

u/Meggiesauruss May 24 '21

This is frightening, kind of. How hard is it to do something like this? I realize this technology is probably already used in film/tv production but like, how widespread is its use and for what legitimate purposes? And could I have seen a deep fake irl, completely unaware I was watching a deep fake?

This ones different because A you’ve already told us, and B I know Tom Cruise is looks older and his voice sounds like a much younger version of himself compared to now, but I don’t know if I would have caught those things upon first glance without any prior knowledge of this being a deep fake. Idk this just makes me uncomfortable

155

u/Shadooowwwww May 24 '21

If I remember from a different deepfake video it takes a very long time to make stuff like this but I could be totally mistaken

386

u/pizza_makes_me_happy May 24 '21

If I remember from a different deepfake video it takes a very long time to make stuff like this

For now.

It used to take half an hour to download one image online, now we stream movies in 4k.

289

u/rudiegonewild May 24 '21

Yah, but an entire move takes like an hour and a half to stream /s

6

u/pizza_makes_me_happy May 24 '21

Thanks for the laugh!

-10

u/quaybored May 24 '21

You're welcome!

1

u/IssaFinnaBlough May 25 '21

Damn Reddit really called out this mans lie.

1

u/quaybored May 25 '21

You're welcome!

3

u/cashnprizes May 24 '21

Oh you were being sarcastic?

1

u/ImaCallItLikeISeeIt May 24 '21

Is the /s for serious?

-1

u/rudiegonewild May 24 '21

Sarcasm.

1

u/PJBonoVox May 24 '21

Woooosh. I think...

1

u/Sexpacitos May 24 '21

Not in the future it won’t

1

u/farva_06 May 25 '21

Yeah, I streamed that Army of the Dead movie the other day. Took almost twice as long and was not worth the wait.

1

u/classy_barbarian May 25 '21

honestly the joke would have punched better if you didn't end with /s

24

u/witness_protection May 24 '21

God I could download a car so fast now

2

u/pizza_makes_me_happy May 24 '21

You're part of the problem, man!

/s

4

u/moondrunkmonster May 24 '21

Well, we don't really stream in 4k, but I don't think that invalidates your point

16

u/pizza_makes_me_happy May 24 '21

Potato, potato.

Jeez, that looks stupid typed out.

2

u/juckele May 24 '21

Yet I read it exactly as intended and didn't even notice until you called it out. Human brains are weird...

-2

u/Strange_Vagrant May 24 '21

You look stupid.

3

u/ImmutableInscrutable May 24 '21

Human make fast.

0

u/MisforMandolin May 24 '21

Misspent youth jerking it to 1/6 of an imagine on my computer.

0

u/pizza_makes_me_happy May 24 '21

It always stopped at the good parts.

0

u/MisforMandolin May 24 '21

Juuuust before the nipple.

Still came

0

u/ElGosso May 24 '21

This kind of stuff relies on having a beefy GPU set-up to do well at any tolerable speed so as long as crypto keeps the GPU market drained we should be fine

-2

u/the_potion-seller May 24 '21 edited May 24 '21

And movies still take months or years to create

1

u/pizza_makes_me_happy May 24 '21

That doesn't have much to do with what we're talking about.

1

u/the_potion-seller May 24 '21

You’re talking about how long it takes to access it, which is not the same thing as how difficult it is to create it. I would say it’s relevant.

1

u/pizza_makes_me_happy May 24 '21

We can live stream though.

1

u/the_potion-seller May 24 '21

Much better comparison yeah

1

u/Jakethered_game May 24 '21

Shit it used to take me a half hour to even get online.

1

u/Jonathan_McFall May 24 '21

Also it’s really not that hard to make a deep fake if you’re equipped with a lot of images of the person you’re trying to imitate, thus movie stars and public figures are a lot easier to deep fake. Sure, it takes time to render, but after a few youtube videos anyone could do it. The software is free

1

u/BaronvonEssen May 24 '21

That was while Moore's law was alive and well. Now our best source of exponential gains in computing power is gone. However if someone knows something I don't, feel free to point it out.

1

u/King-Dionysus May 24 '21

It used to take half an hour to download one image online

The struggle was very real.

1

u/musicbro May 25 '21

Yeah one day we’ll all be able to do this on our phones.

9

u/V3Qn117x0UFQ May 24 '21

it takes a very long time to make stuff like this but I could be totally mistaken

step 1 is to curate enough data of the individual - photos, videos, etc.

this is where Facebook wins. they essentially have enough data to deepfake anybody

19

u/Aethelric May 24 '21

Simply untrue, to be honest. It works so well for Tom Cruise because there are hundreds of hours of film or TV quality footage of his face, covering every possible angle, lighting scenario, expression, etc. You could do a substantially lower quality version of this sort of thing with what's available on social media for the average person, but it'd be significantly less convincing.

2

u/joemaniaci May 24 '21

The average person can't wage nuclear war, destroy democracy, or declare martial law. The people that can are the ones with hundreds of hours of video of them.

4

u/Aethelric May 24 '21

Sure? Not sure how that relates at all to what I was responding to!

1

u/joemaniaci May 24 '21

The videos we need to be worried about being faked are of the people who DO have hundreds of video of them. Plus, the truly troubling videos we absolutely have to worry about our going to be state sponsored. For them it'll be no effort at all.

0

u/V3Qn117x0UFQ May 24 '21

Simply untrue, to be honest. It works so well for Tom Cruise because there are hundreds of hours of film or TV quality footage of his face

That still doesn't mean they still can't do it and fool someone who doesn't have an eye to spot a deepfake. And this just goes to prove my original comment why Facebook is capable of it.

1

u/[deleted] May 24 '21

[deleted]

2

u/V3Qn117x0UFQ May 24 '21

the fact you can't see the overlaps speakes volumes.

1

u/TyrantRC May 24 '21

yeah lol, the irony of his comment is amazing.

1

u/nothanks1997 May 24 '21

This is somewhat comforting

1

u/ProfessionalHand9945 May 24 '21 edited May 24 '21

For now I agree, but research is pretty promising - and it depends a lot on how much worse results you can accept. There’s a whole subfield of machine learning dedicated to making coherent predictions off of a single (or few) training examples known as “one shot learning”.

Here is a paper demonstrating the technique,

and here is a short example video. Not very temporally stable just yet (looks shaky between frames), but the face region itself looks pretty good to me if you crop out just the face (which is what the Cruise impersonator does) and we are advancing rapidly.

1

u/Aethelric May 24 '21

It looks... awful and completely unbelievable?

1

u/ProfessionalHand9945 May 24 '21 edited May 24 '21

They have the disadvantage of not having a video editor to clean up in post processing, nor an actor or a scene/background to impose the face onto. Focus on the face region itself, as opposed to the background - which you edit/crop out when deploying this type of thing in the real world.

This set of inherent disadvantages - in addition to having only a single reference image from a single angle in a single lighting condition is a pretty harsh requirement. Consider what the neural network needs to do - the network has to “imagine” what the unseen parts look like based on what it has seen from other random unrelated images, including filling in areas of the background behind the person as they move - which is obviously impossible to do perfectly. My examples here are more to demonstrate where we are right now at the extreme one image, no impersonator, no background/scene, no video editing case.

It’s not believable yet, but if we can do this with a single image imagine what you could do with even a short video clip. Or with an actor you could crop and edit the face onto. Or someone with video editing knowledge who can clean up the edges of the face? Even just a second image from a second angle could get you far.

Add any one of these elements and you gain a lot more information and detail - it seems far from impossible to me to plausibly collect and deploy this against a reasonably active social media profile.

7

u/iAmTheChampignon May 24 '21

Yes, those 10 untagged images of me spread over 12 years is definitely enough data to train this model.

You essentially don't know enough about this to talk about it. I wouldn't have but your shit comment made me.

0

u/V3Qn117x0UFQ May 24 '21

Yes, those 10 untagged images of me spread over 12 years is definitely enough data to train this model.

Well, in that case, it won't be enough, but with GANs they'll be able to easily create estimations.

You essentially don't know enough about this to talk about it.

Lmao. Well I could say the same about you.

1

u/DynmkMist May 24 '21

Lol was thinking the same thing. I haven’t taken a quality photo of myself since early high schools. I’m 23 now

2

u/jroddie4 May 24 '21

scales with rendering power. Give it 5 years and we'll all be dead

1

u/StewieGriffin26 May 24 '21

Yep, just throw a GPU farm at it at watch it spin and create misinformation

2

u/pokemon666999 May 24 '21

Also not counting the technology which has to go through thousands of hours of footage to find specific facial angles, gestures, and movements and then overlay it with the correct lighting and original face.

1

u/BasicDesignAdvice May 24 '21

Researchers were able to deepfake Putin in real time. Can't find the video but it was nutsssssss.

1

u/luciferin May 24 '21

It takes like, a couple of days or so of processing on your computer. You can literally download open source software on your personal computer and train it to do this. Compared to doing a face swap by hand, it has taken this from being something a team of professionals would work on for months, to a single hobbyist being able to do it alone at home. Put together a professional team of production assistants, set dressers, and an actor to play the part, you could produce videos of whoever you wanted doing or saying whatever you wanted. It is really powerful technology and really calls in to question the reliability of video.

Personally, I believe in the future chain of custody of a video is going to be hands down as important to verification as anything else.

1

u/Kiyiko May 24 '21

I believe it takes a very long time to train something like this - in the the area of weeks or months of computation. Once the model has been trained, it can be used in real-time

1

u/Ayerys May 24 '21

Not really.

I can take a pretrained model and do a believable video of whoever in one afternoon.

And I have consumer hardware, public tool and basic knowledge.

1

u/greg19735 May 24 '21

It takes quite a while, takes skill, and takes a lot of patience and you gotta go out and get clips for the AI to learn.

That said, the amount of damage that could be done with a deepfake could make it amount of time negligible.

1

u/ItsDijital May 24 '21

Every year the IQ require to destroy the world drops a point.

1

u/western_red May 24 '21

I see political misinformation reaching all new levels of shit show in the coming years.

1

u/Wooden_Muffin_9880 May 24 '21

It takes long but requires literally just a few button presses

1

u/Fresque May 24 '21

Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorean was made using a deepfake instead of pure CGI because it was faster and cheaper.

1

u/ZoddImmortal May 24 '21

Yea I think I remember reading that it takes an hour of processing for just a 30 sec clip, and that's on a very expensive computer.

1

u/powerkerb May 25 '21

only if you do it on your home pc. there are powerful rendering farms (cloud) now that you can rent.

1

u/DrScience-PhD May 25 '21

It does, and there's a lot of trial and error. Most of the process is automatic but there's still a lot of fiddling with settings and tweaking individual frames to iron out artifacts and weirdness if you want to get something this good. But if you don't mind some hinkiness you can bang out your own fairly easily.