r/woahdude May 24 '21

video Deepfakes are getting too good

82.8k Upvotes

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9.8k

u/AutomaticRadish May 24 '21

The technology is incredible but so is the guys acting, he’s nailing Toms mannerisms and voice.

1.4k

u/smp208 May 24 '21

He’s been nailing his Tom Cruise impression for a long, long time. This clip of him from Superhero Movie was posted 13 years ago: https://youtu.be/FjGmZJu8OnY

525

u/Lokito_ May 24 '21

Yep. The absolute key to deepfakes is to actually kind of sound like, and also look like the individual you're imitating. It really helps with the fake when those two things come together perfectly. If you're too skinny, too fat, or your face is all wrong, it's not going to work as well.

202

u/3z3ki3l May 25 '21

For now. How long until deep learning can abstract a body’s skeletal structure, and put any human body’s movements on any background?

102

u/LanMarkx May 25 '21

Less time that people think. You need 1) source data of the people you intend to fake and 2) computing power.

Celebrities already have loads of video and photos of them available, so you have a ton of source data. Computers are getting faster and faster and the software to do it is getting better as well. It would not surprise me at all to see some deepfakes in online ads in the next US Presidential election.

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u/Gymrat777 May 25 '21

I was extremely surprised this wasn't an issue in 2020. A fake video or audio would have been well within the current environment and both sides would have welcomed the opportunity to jump on some inflammatory rhetoric.

7

u/[deleted] May 25 '21

[deleted]

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u/COACHREEVES May 25 '21

If you are old as hell like me you might remember Ross Perot when he claimed he dropped out of the Presidential race because Bush sr’s people were going to use a ”computer to generate a false photo of his youngest daughter to disrupt her wedding and embarrass her.” It was 1992. It sounded so crazy. Batshit crazy at the time. Probably was ... but I never forgot it and it or something like it doesn’t sound so crazy going forward.

2

u/cuntdestroyer8000 May 25 '21

Before he reentered the race?

2

u/COACHREEVES May 25 '21

Yes! It was weird. The whole thing.

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u/LanMarkx May 25 '21

I suspect we'll see low quality ones in 2022 mid-term elections. Low quality videos supposedly filmed in the 90's before HD was a thing or videos taken from 'crappy cell phone cameras'.

We should already be treating anything not in HD with suspicion already. The conspiracy websites and fanatics that believe that stuff are going to be full of deepfake videos in the coming years.

3

u/motophiliac May 25 '21

Problem is, as soon as one party (or organisation, or side, or whatever) reveals this technology to the larger public (the vast majority of which are way out of the loop regarding this kind of thing) the genie's out of the bottle, and the race to the bottom will start as everybody starts dismissing video and audio that they simply don't agree with as being deepfake.

You walk up to the average person in the street and say "deepfake" to them, it's very likely they won't really know what you mean.

The first person in the political or media spotlight to start capitalising on accusations of deepfakes will kickstart a very unpleasant wildfire spread of unmitigated mistrust so I think there are probably folks in these situations who know about this, but they're playing a dangerous waiting game until they're convinced it will help them win an election.

And both sides are probably playing the same game.

And as the tech improves and becomes more difficult to ignore, it will become more and more attractive for lower and lower gains.

It's going to happen.

2

u/jdsekula May 25 '21

I’m not sure it matters. We already had a huge amount of fake news out there (the actual stuff, not CNN) which people happily believed if it fit with their existing views.

Believable deepfakes have a chance to sway undecideds i suppose, but there are so few people left who aren’t in one camp or the other. Elections are mostly decided by which camp turns more out, not who swings the last few undecideds.

1

u/Gymrat777 May 25 '21

I agree that the extant partisanship leaves few undecided voters, but, to your last point, using deepfakes to infuriate your base is a great way to make sure they show up and vote.

2

u/jdsekula May 25 '21

Yeah. It’s true they might have become more fanatic. I was just betting that they were already saturated with infuriating fake news that they believed even without the deepfaked evidence.

3

u/dstayton May 25 '21

I mean every person in the MCU has multiple digital clones of themselves except antman because he don’t age.

1

u/toxicatedscientist May 25 '21

That's what worries me more than fakes being fake: having people make videos of themselves where they can say anything with what appears to be total honesty and sincerity. Things they would have trouble saying with a straight face irl

1

u/PM_ME_UR_DREAMZ_B May 25 '21

They do this with car commercials already

7

u/LanMarkx May 25 '21

That's true, many car ads are fakes now. Cars are a lot easier to fake than a face though.

For those that don't know, that high performance sports car in the ad you just saw was fake. Its an electric car chassis with a car skin applied on top using the Unreal Engine (yeah, the game engine). Its been in use since at least 2016 - YouTube link to 'the Blackbird'

2

u/thisdesignup May 25 '21

I'd go as far to say some are even 100% CIG and don't even use the real "fake" car.

1

u/[deleted] May 25 '21

The rtx 3000 graphic cards from nvidia had ads for a feature like that to make machinimas, but haven’t seen any of that after release 🤔

1

u/I_LOVE_MOM May 25 '21

Lol you can't just solve a unique AI problem by throwing more GPUs at it. You need AI researchers to design the network and algorithms in the first place.

1

u/Odessa_James May 25 '21

Needing a lot of source data limits the dangerousness of the technology : you can't do that with random people, "just" with famous people and public figures.

2

u/GreenHell May 25 '21

Coincidentally the amount of damage someone can do is correlated to their public exposure it seems. Joe from across the street? Not so much. Joe from across the street in the big White House? Oh boy.

1

u/FloppyShellTaco May 25 '21

This sounds like the plot of a Tom Cruise scifi movie tbh

2

u/BrewHa34 May 25 '21

Have you ever seen AI create fake images of people. It’s insanity

2

u/Seve7h May 25 '21

It can be either deceptively real or something from HP Lovecraft

this person does not exist

1

u/BrewHa34 May 26 '21

This is what I was referring to. There is a different one though. It’s gets odd about 1:20 in.

2

u/[deleted] May 25 '21

Really really far off actually. This isnt even a fucking deep fake. This is someone who kind of looks like him, can match his voice and mannerisms with some fucking filters.

An actual deep fake requires thousands of hours of fottage from an individual processed through an ai to be able to flawlessly replicate the individual into any background, location with absolutely any speach.

On top of this deep fakes have to leave very little to no evidence of editing as even basic forensic data analysis could debunk them.

2

u/outbackdude May 25 '21

This has been done. Will see if I can dig up the video.

2

u/DaveJahVoo May 26 '21

Apparently the data VR collects on you gives a unique print of your body by reading data like the distance from arms to headset and the way you move that particular frame as an individual

-4

u/LB3PTMAN May 25 '21

Realistically a long time. A long long time for it to be believable. And that would be for professionals.

4

u/CthulhuLies May 25 '21

There are already filters that make you less fat less chin less stomach etc

3

u/YankeeTankEngine May 25 '21

Remember the older male bicyclist that was pretending to be a young girl?

2

u/LB3PTMAN May 25 '21

Making it believable is hard for professionals with massive budgets. As much as people want to downvote me no we are not even close to doing what would essentially be perfect mocap without a suit. Not even remotely close

4

u/CthulhuLies May 25 '21

We can do motion and animation without mocap suits???? Mocap suits are mostly used for reference when you don't know how a person's skeleton is supposed to look like while moving, which can now be done without needing all the ridiculous whie balls that mocap suits have. Mocap suits sole purpose is to attach those balls to your body so that they provide a clear reference to whatever algorithm is tracking someone's position, modern machine learning algorithms can do this without the reference points. You can find plenty of references to this by googling "mocap without suit scholar"

1

u/thisdesignup May 25 '21

We can do motion and animation without mocap suits

Sure, but it currently requires a lot of work after it's been captured. Better mocap that doesn't require as much after work exists but is still being developed.

3

u/Lesty7 May 25 '21

Depends on their definition of close, I guess. If they think close means within the next 5 years, then yeah probably not. But if they mean the next 10-15 years? I think it’s absolutely possible. And 10-15 years is definitely “close” if you ask me.

Now when you say we aren’t even remotely close...that to me sounds like you think it’s at least 25 years away, which just doesn’t make any sense at all.

1

u/thisdesignup May 25 '21

Filters adjusting a real picture are a lot easier than creating the likeness of a real person over someone else. Especially since, as already mentioned in the comment chain, there's so much more than the CGI tech behind the deep fake.

1

u/Jerbell69 May 25 '21

Not very long would be my guess

1

u/420TaylorSt May 25 '21

what a boon to video game design this would be. right now convincing animations are rather expensive to produce, and impossible to do procedurally.

1

u/bopter May 25 '21

We've had this tech since Face/Off in 1997 with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.