The concept is simple: you face-swap celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies.

Although that’s the most common practice, the technology, created by a Reddit user known as “deepfakes”, can be used to put anyone’s face onto anyone’s body:

He [deepfakes] made several convincing porn videos of celebrities—including Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift—using a machine learning algorithm, his home computer, publicly available videos, and some spare time.

Now the tech has even been turned into an app, to assist those who don’t know computer science all that well in using the algorithm.

Yeah, revenge porn has been taken to another level.

On Friday, gaming chat service Discord was forced to shut down a user-created group that was spreading the videos, citing their policy against revenge porn, reports The Verge:

Discord is a free chat platform that caters to gamers, and has a poor track record when it comes to dealing with abuse and toxic communities. After it was contacted by Business Insider, the company took down the chat group, named “deepfakes.”

Just as VICE’s Motherboard explains, we’re all in a lot of bother.

Take a look at this, the least pornographic of the shared creations:

Yes, that’s Germany’s Angela Merkel with Donald Trump’s face.

Below is the beginning of a clip where actress Daisy Ridley’s face was put on the body of another porn performer:

However, creating such videos takes dedication:

Running the entire process, from data extraction to frame-by-frame conversion of one face onto another, would take about eight to 12 hours if done correctly. Other people have reported spending much longer, sometimes with disastrous results.

Take this for example – the video is a little NSFW, in case anyone is looking over your shoulder:

Scary.

But beyond revenge porn and the like, this technology is moving very rapidly – whether or not we’re ready for it:

Deborah Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Applied Ethics at the University of Virginia’s school of engineering, told me there’s no doubt this technology would get so good that it’d be impossible to tell the difference between an AI-generated face swap and the real thing.

“You could argue that what’s new is the degree to which it can be done, or the believability, we’re getting to the point where we can’t distinguish what’s real—but then, we didn’t before,” she said. “What is new is the fact that it’s now available to everybody, or will be… It’s destabilizing. The whole business of trust and reliability is undermined by this stuff.”

In an era of fake news, it appears fake videos will be just as popular. Let’s just hope people stop believing everything they see before it all unravels.

[source:vice&theverge]