The world’s top deepfake artist is wrestling with the monster he created - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614083/the-worlds-top-deepfake-artist-is-wrestling-with-the-monster-he-cr
Misinformation has long been a popular tool of geopolitical sabotage, but social media has injected rocket fuel into the spread of fake news. When fake video footage is as easy to make as fake news articles, it is a virtual guarantee that it will be weaponized. Want to sway an election, ruin the career and reputation of an enemy, or spark ethnic violence? It’s hard to imagine a more effective vehicle than a clip that looks authentic, spreading like wildfire through Facebook, WhatsApp, or Twitter, faster than people can figure out they’ve been duped.
As a pioneer of digital fakery, Li worries that deepfakes are only the beginning. Despite having helped usher in an era when our eyes cannot always be trusted, he wants to use his skills to do something about the looming problem of ubiquitous, near-perfect video deception.
Li isn’t your typical deepfaker. He doesn’t lurk on Reddit posting fake porn or reshoots of famous movies modified to star Nicolas Cage. He’s spent his career developing cutting-edge techniques to forge faces more easily and convincingly. He has also messed with some of the most famous faces in the world for modern blockbusters, fooling millions of people into believing in a smile or a wink that was never actually there. Talking over Skype from his office in Los Angeles one afternoon, he casually mentions that Will Smith stopped in recently, for a movie he’s working on.
Actors often come to Li’s lab at the University of Southern California (USC) to have their likeness digitally scanned. They are put inside a spherical array of lights and machine vision cameras to capture the shape of their face, facial expressions, and skin tone and texture down to the level of individual pores. A special-effects team working on a movie can then manipulate scenes that have already been shot, or even add an actor to a new one in post-production.
Shortly after joining USC, Li created facial tracking technology used to make a digital version of the late actor Paul Walker for the action movie Furious 7. It was a big achievement, since Walker, who died in a car accident halfway through shooting, had not been scanned beforehand, and his character needed to appear in so many scenes. Li’s technology was used to paste Walker’s face onto the bodies of his two brothers, who took turns acting in his place in more than 200 scenes.
The movie, which grossed $1.5 billion at the box office, was the first to depend so heavily on a digitally re-created star. Li mentions Walker’s virtual role when talking about how good video trickery is becoming. “Even I can’t tell which ones are fake,” he says with a shake of his head.
La vague des repentis s’élargit... Mais c’est intéressant cette façon de voir : tant que ce sont quelques personnes bien intentionnées, les technologies sont magiques, mais quand cela devient accessible à tout le monde, les problèmes arrivent. On a vu ce discours se répéter depuis que l’internet s’est ouvert au public.
Underneath the digital silliness, though, is an important trend: AI is rapidly making advanced image manipulation the province of the smartphone rather than the desktop. FaceApp, developed by a company in Saint Petersburg, Russia, has drawn millions of users, and recent controversy, by offering a one-click way to change a face on your phone. You can add a smile to a photo, remove blemishes, or mess with your age or gender (or someone else’s). Dozens more apps offer similar manipulations at the click of a button.
Not everyone is excited about the prospect of this technology becoming ubiquitous. Li and others are “basically trying to make one-image, mobile, and real-time deepfakes,” says Sam Gregory, director of Witness, a nonprofit focused on video and human rights. “That’s the threat level that worries me, when it [becomes] something that’s less easily controlled and more accessible to a range of actors.”
Fortunately, most deepfakes still look a bit off. A flickering face, a wonky eye, or an odd skin tone make them easy enough to spot. But just as an expert can remove such flaws, advances in AI promise to smooth them out automatically, making the fake videos both simpler to create and harder to detect.
Even as Li races ahead with digital fakery, he is also troubled by the potential for harm. “We’re sitting in front of a problem,” he says.
(Medifor : programme de la DARPA our reconnaître les deepfakes)
Earlier this year, Matt Turek, DARPA program manager for MediFor, asked Li to demonstrate his fakes to the MediFor researchers. This led to a collaboration with Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s foremost authorities on digital forensics. The pair are now engaged in a digital game of cat-and-mouse, with Li developing deepfakes for Farid to catch, and then refining them to evade detection.
Farid, Li, and others recently released a paper outlining a new, more powerful way to spot deepfakes. It hinges on training a machine-learning algorithm to recognize the quirks of a specific individual’s facial expressions and head movements. If you simply paste someone’s likeness onto another face, those features won’t be carried over. It would require a lot of computer power and training data—i.e., images or video of the person—to make a deepfake that incorporates these characteristics. But one day it will be possible. “Technical solutions will continue to improve on the defensive side,” says Turek. “But will that be perfect? I doubt it.”
#Fake_news #deepfakes #Intelligence_artificielle #Art #Cinéma
