Best deepfake app Archives

Musk predicts AI will be superior to humans within five years

Elon Musk has made another of his trademark predictions – this time, it’s that AI will be superior to humans within five years.

Musk has been among the most vocal prominent figures in warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence. In 2018, for example, Musk famously warned that AI could become “an immortal dictator from which we would never escape” and that the technology is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

Speaking in a New York Times interview, Musk...

Beware the AI winter – but can Covid-19 alter this process?

We have had a blockchain winter as the hype around the technology moves towards a reality - and the same will happen with artificial intelligence (AI).

That's according to Dr Karol Przystalski, CTO at IT consulting and software development provider Codete. Przystalski founded Codete having had a significant research background in AI, with previous employers including Sabre and IBM and a PhD exploring skin cancer pattern recognition using neural networks.

Yet what effect...

AI bot had to unlearn English grammar to decipher Trump speeches

A developer had to recalibrate his artificial intelligence bot to account for the unconventional grammar and syntax found in President Trump's speeches.

As originally reported by the Los Angeles Times, Bill Frischling noticed in 2017 that his AI bot, Margaret, was struggling to transcribe part of the President's speech from May 4 that year commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea. In particular, Margaret crashed after this 127-word section, featuring a...

Deepfake app puts your face on GIFs while limiting data collection

A new app called Doublicat allows users to superimpose their face into popular GIFs using deep learning technology.

In the name of research, here's one I made earlier:

Doublicat uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to do its magic. The GAN is called RefaceAI and is developed by a company of the same name.

RefaceAI was previously used in a face swapping app called Reflect. Elon Musk once used Reflect to put his face on Dwayne Johnson's...

Applause’s new AI solution helps tackle bias and sources data at scale

Testing specialists Applause have debuted an AI solution promising to help tackle algorithmic bias while providing the scale of data needed for robust training.

Applause has built a vast global community of testers for its app testing solution which is trusted by brands including Google, Uber, PayPal, and more. The company is leveraging this relatively unique asset to help overcome some of the biggest hurdles facing AI development.

AI News spoke with Kristin Simonini, VP...

Nvidia explains how ‘true adoption’ of AI is making an impact

Nvidia Senior Director of Enterprise David Hogan spoke at this year’s AI Expo about how the company is seeing artificial intelligence adoption making an impact.

In the keynote session, titled ‘What is the true adoption of AI’, Hogan provided real-world examples of how the technology is being used and enabled by Nvidia’s GPUs. But first, he highlighted the momentum we’re seeing in AI.

“Many governments have announced investments in AI and how they're going...

Toy around with deep learning in Nvidia’s AI Playground

Nvidia launched an online space called AI Playground on Monday which allows people to mess around with some deep learning experiences.

AI Playground is designed to be accessible in order to help anyone get started and learn about the potential of artificial intelligence. Who knows, it may even inspire some to enter the field and help to address the huge skill shortage.

The experience currently features three demos:

Imagine InPaintingArtistic Style...

Microsoft and MIT develop AI to fix driverless car ‘blind spots’

Microsoft and MIT have partnered on a project to fix so-called virtual ‘blind spots’ which lead driverless cars to make errors.

Roads, especially while shared with human drivers, are unpredictable places. Training a self-driving car for every possible situation is a monumental task.

The AI developed by Microsoft and MIT compares the action taken by humans in a given scenario to what the driverless car’s own AI would do. Where the human decision is more optimal, the...

Trump speech ‘DeepFake’ shows a present AI threat

A so-called ‘DeepFake’ video of a Trump speech was broadcast on a Fox-owned Seattle TV network, showing a very present AI threat.

The station, Q13, broadcasted a doctored Trump speech in which he somehow appeared even more orange and pulled amusing faces.

You can see a side-by-side comparison with the original below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZLs11uSg-A&feature=youtu.be

Following the broadcast, a Q13 employee was sacked. It’s unclear if...

Talent has begun leaking from DeepMind in recent months

If DeepMind is on your CV, you could walk into most tech companies and be offered a job on the spot with a six-figure salary. The firm is full of in-demand talent and its CEO once bragged that no employees had ever left.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2016, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said:

“We are able to literally get the best scientists from each country each year. So we’ll have, say, the person that won the Physics Olympiad in Poland, the person who got the top...

(Bloomberg) — Chinese face-swap app Zao rocketed to the top of app store charts over the weekend, but user delight at the prospect of becoming instant superstars quickly turned sour as privacy implications began to sink in.

Launched recently, Zao is currently topping the free download chart on China’s iOS store. Its popularity has also pushed another face-swap app, Yanji, to fifth place on the list. Behind Zao is a company fully owned by Chinese hookup and live-streaming service Momo Inc. President Wang Li and co-Founder Lei Xiaoliang, according to public company registration documents.

Users of the app upload a photo of themselves to drop their likeness into popular scenes from hundreds of movies or TV shows. It’s a chance to be the star and swap places with the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Leonardo DiCaprio or Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory in a matter of moments.

The photo uploads have proven problematic, however. A user can provide an existing photo or, following on-screen prompts, create a series of photos where they blink their eyes and open their mouth to help create a more realistic deepfake. An earlier version of Zao’s user agreement stated that the app had “free, irrevocable, permanent, transferable, and relicense-able” rights to all this user-generated content. Zao has since updated its terms — the app now says it won’t use headshots or mini videos uploaded by users for purposes other than to improve the app or things pre-agreed by users. If users delete the content they uploaded, the app will erase it from its servers as well.

But the reaction has not been quick enough, as Zao has been deluged by a wave of negative reviews that now sees its App Store rating stand at 1.9 stars out of five, following more than 4,000 reviews. Many users complained about the privacy issue.

“We understand the concern about privacy. We’ve received the feedback, and will fix the issues that we didn’t take into consideration, which will need a bit of time,” a statement posted to Zao’s account on social-media platform Weibo said.

On Monday, the China E-Commerce Research Center urged authorities to look into the matter. The app “violates certain laws and standards set by the nation and the industry,” the research house said in a statement, citing Wang Zheng of the Taihang Law Firm.

It’s not the first time such face-swapping apps have enjoyed popularity either in China or around the world, but Zao’s smooth and quick integration of faces into videos and internet memes is what makes it stand out.

The machine learning technology underpinning deepfakes of this kind has matured rapidly, to the point where it can believably impersonate famous personalities like Joe Rogan and make them say whatever the aspiring faker types. U.S. politicians are wrestling with the issue of how to regulate this emergent misinformation threat, and top Democrat Adam Schiff has described it as a source of “nightmarish scenarios” for the 2020 presidential election.

At the individual level, FaceApp is the most famous and notorious deepfake face-modification app to date. It went viral globally on two different occasions, showing people how they’d look in their old age or with their gender flipped. The app also kicked up an unintentional privacy scare with its practice of uploading images to servers to be processed, illustrating a growing sensitivity to how user data is handled.

After users flooded WeChat, China’s most widely used social media platform, with Zao-enabled short clips and GIFs, the Tencent Holdings Ltd.-operated messaging app banned links to the service, saying there have been numerous reports about it presenting “security risks.” Tencent didn’t immediately comment on the decision.

“I just realized the terms are so unfair but it’s too late,” one unhappy iOS reviewer of Zao wrote. “Nowadays people don’t usually bother to read them.”

“Rubbish, hooligan software,” added another reviewer.

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For 30 seconds, anyone in China can now take the place of Leonardo DiCaprio in some of his most iconic roles — and all it takes is a smartphone and a bit of personal data.

The Chinese app Zao has surged in popularity over the past few days to become the country’s top smartphone app, and descriptions of what it does have gone viral on social media in the U.S.

The app’s appeal is simple: Upload a photo and it will swap DiCaprio’s face with a user’s in a 30-second mashup of clips from his films. Or it can do the same with a character from “Game of Thrones,” or with a performer in a music video. The app is only available in China, though some people outside the country have been able to get around that restriction.

It’s as easy as using a photo filter on Instagram or Snapchat, according to people who have used it, but it also demonstrates the remarkable power of advances in artificial intelligence to make fake videos.

Allan Xia, an artist in New Zealand who was able to download the app, said in a viral series of tweets that he was able to create a DiCaprio video using his own face in eight seconds. And he said he was quickly overwhelmed by the implications.

“Imagine logging into your Netflix or Disney+ account — watching the latest TV show/Marvel movie, where a stand-in actor’s would be auto-replaced with your own,” he tweeted.

“The newest member of the Avengers is ... YOU,” he said. “I’m both excited and interested from a technologist/creator perspective and morbidly cynical from a moral one.”

Phone apps that use machine learning to put an entertaining twist on selfies have proved irresistible to millions of people. Google makes an app that shows people which piece of artwork they resemble. In July, FaceApp, which allows people to see what they look like as another gender or as years older, saw a spike in popularity.

But with each app, security and privacy questions resurface, including: What is the company doing with the photos?

Zao’s original user agreement said that people who upload their images had agreed to surrender the intellectual property rights to their face and allow their images to be used for marketing purposes, Reuters reported.

But after criticism from users, Zao backtracked, revising its user agreement to say it would not take ownership of the intellectual property rights to users’ faces.

“We understand the concern about privacy,” the company, a unit of the Beijing-based app maker Momo, said on the social network Weibo, according to Bloomberg News. “We’ve received the feedback, and will fix the issues that we didn’t take into consideration, which will need a bit of time.”

WeChat, China’s ubiquitous messaging service and social media platform, banned links to Zao, citing security risks.

Baptiste Robert, a French security researcher who also goes by Elliot Alderson, said the company is still retaining information about its users. He said he deleted one of the videos he had made with Zao, but then saw the company still stored a copy of it.

“If you care about your privacy, you shouldn’t use Zao,” he said in an email. “You give a part of privacy against something cool. Once the cool effect is done, your privacy is gone forever.”

Beyond privacy, Zao has started a debate about what will happen when more powerful face-swapping software is in the hands of billions of people.

Zao’s offerings so far are limited; it gives people a choice of which celebrities they want to trade faces with, but users can’t choose from any video ever produced. That may change, though, in the near future, and people are already testing the limits of deepfake software.

One video that took off this year on YouTube showed former “Saturday Night Live” star Bill Hader doing an impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hader’s face morphs into Schwarzenegger’s — a sort of test run for how such videos will be received by the public at large.

“It can’t really be contained, and there’s also high demand for it,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, who testified before Congress this year about deepfake videos.

Watts, a former special agent on the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, said he could imagine countless uses of the technology to mislead people, especially in countries that do not have a widely read independent press or other watchdogs. He suggested that someone might use the technology to show a fake beheading, the kind of incident that might cause a riot.

“There’s no one to step in and say: ‘This didn’t really happen. This is a fake thing,’” he said.

Jack Clark, the policy director for OpenAI, an organization in San Francisco trying to build “safe and beneficial” artificial intelligence, said Zao’s developers and everyone involved in such research should think ahead to potential downsides.

“Technology developers should be trying to anticipate the positive and negative uses of their technology and should be trying to communicate explicitly about them and what those are to more people,” Clark said in an email.

“It’s insufficient if this is just tech companies — it requires work from individual developers, to academia, to companies,” he said.

David Ingram covers tech for NBC News.