How DeepFakes Are Made?
A neural network algorithm known as an autoencoder can be used for creating DeepFakes which attach a fake face to an original face. Suppose you want to attach the face of Jon Snow to Tyrion Lannister. To do that you take thousands of collected photos of both Jon and Tyrion and run them through a neural network called an encoder. This encoder will study the facial features in both faces and compress the images into the standard features they both have.
Then a neural network called a decoder will take these compressed images and recover the face of Jon. Similarly, another decoder will do this for Tyrion. To get Jon’s face on Tyrion’s face, all you have to do is take a compressed image of Jon’s face and feed it into the decoder that was trained on images of Tyrion.
So, this decoder will reconstruct Tyrion’s face but it will use all the mannerisms and expressions that appear on Jon’s face. This has to be done on every image frame in a video to show Tyrion Lannister actually looking like Jon Snow. Which is very weird to imagine! Another method to create DeepFakes uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).
This basically involves two neural networks that are known as the Generator and the Discriminator respectively. The Generator creates fake images using a data set of existing real images like celebrities. Then the Discriminator tries to catch any defects in the generated images. The fake images created by the Generator at the beginning are obviously fake and don’t even look like faces but with multiple passes, a real-looking fake image can be created.
This is a classic case of “Fake it till you make it!”. In fact, it is even easier to create fake images if there is a large training data set of images already available. That is why celebrities and famous people are targeted the most. They have the most images and videos out in public.
What Are DeepFakes And How Dangerous Are They?
Did you hate the last season of Game of Thrones? Most probably! Did you also watch the online video of Jon Snow saying sorry for the horrible script of season 8? That video obviously wasn’t a real video as Jon Snow knows nothing! It was actually a fake but it looked so real. That’s because it was a DeepFake video made using Artificial Intelligence. Are you wondering what DeepFake is? Let’s check it out! DeepFake uses Deep Learning, a subset of Machine Learning, to create videos that look real but are actually fake. It is basically a technology that can replace the face of a person in an image or a video with so much precision that it looks real. Or it can make a person say something on a video that they never actually said in real life. “What you see is what you get” is no longer true on the internet because of DeepFakes. And that is how you can see Jon Snow blaming the last season of Game of Thrones when this never actually happened!