Patrick Stewart is replaced by Nicolas Cage in Star Trek. “I experimented with this method on and off for a while, but didn’t make anything useful,” says Deepfakes.įinally, 2016 brought the meteoric rise of automated machine learning–systems that could improve upon themselves–which Deepfakes refers to as “steroids” on all the science that came before. A 2009 paper, Face Reconstruction in the Wild, offered better insights–with enough 2D photos at enough angles, you could actually create a full, continuous 3D model. “Although most of the time the model is really bad and looks like you pasted someone’s face on a potato,” says Deepfakes.
The paper offered a technique that used a single 2D image to create a full 3D face. That led Deepfakes down a rabbit hole, all the way to the classic 1999 paper A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces which inspired Oblivion. For the past twelve years, Deepfakes has been obsessed with facial mapping technologies, first borne from a stint playing the 2006 video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion “at a young age.” The game allowed players to customize their avatar’s face with various sliders and options.
It can also explain why I’m obsessed with generating realistic face images.”ĭeepfakes won’t tell me their name, their age, or their profession, but they are quite open in talking about what they believe, and what brought them to release their code to the masses. “Some people like feet, some people like big breasts, some people like familiar and attractive faces in their porn. “It may be considered a fetish,” the user known as Deepfakes writes me via Reddit. It was easy to imagine where it would go next. Suddenly, the entire internet had access to a technique that allowed them to map anyone–acquaintances, minors, enemies–into sexually explicit videos. Other Redditors quickly followed suit though users still needed to collect hundreds or even thousands of pictures of someone to use the Deepfakes AI, all of the hard, logical work in training the machine was automated.
The anonymous Redditor premiered their tech by releasing a series of videos featuring famous actresses cast in pornography. Kate McKinnon’s impersonation is transformed into the real Hillary Clinton–thanks to Deepfakes machine learning. Then, another Redditor quickly created FakeApp, which gave the Deepfakes scripts a user-friendly front end.
The jaw-dropping effect is still fairly difficult and expensive, though–or it was until an anonymous Redditor named Deepfakes changed all that overnight and brought Ulbrich’s words back to me with perfect clarity. In early 2018, Deepfakes released a unique bit of code to the public that allows anyone to easily and convincingly map a face onto someone else’s head in full motion video. But the company left its mark: digital face-swapping has become a mainstay tool of Hollywood, putting Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genesis and Carrie Fisher in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “And the next time we do it it’s going to be less difficult, and less slow and less expensive.” Digital Domain eventually pivoted to resurrecting Tupac as a hologram, and later declared bankruptcy. “It was really hard, it was really slow, it was really tedious, it was really expensive,” Ulbrich said at the time. Still from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.