‘Deepfake’: Terrifying video tech goes viral

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has definitely begun new era of modernisation but it is now opening new doors of cyber challenges internationally amid ongoing global efforts to counter fake news as a new video tech ‘deepfake’ emerges with its nearly perfect engineering of turning human paintings into movable images.

As of now, Leonardo Da Vinci and dead celebs such as Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein have now turned into moving images by Samsung’s artificial intelligence lab in Russia, The Sun reported.

The computer expert in Moscow have managed to do it create them using only one image by taking one step forward after researchers who take multiple pictures of a celeb before “mapping” them onto the moving features of another person to create the so-called ‘deepfake’ in a technique known as “puppeteering”

It is said to be more frightening in the prospect of hackers to create a fake video by using multiple photos.

In the Mona Lisa example, the team shows how the animated painting looks slightly different depending on the person whose face is used behind the famous image.

“We show that such an approach is able to learn highly realistic and personalized talking head models of new people and even portrait paintings,” the authors said.

However, concerns remain high for usage of the technology in the wrong hands particularly in the murky world of political propaganda and fake news.

In 2018, Washington lawmakers had warned that such bogus videos could be a threat to national security as many videos already created featuring former US President Barack Obama appearing to speak like Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Legality of ‘deepfaking’

It is certainly a violation but such apps could also be illegal, according to Andrew Murray, Professor of Law at the London School of Economics.

He told the Sun the actresses could sue for defamation should they be viewed “less favourably by members of society” as a result.

Murray added: “More likely such images could be viewed as forms of harassment, which they could report to the police.”

Simon Miles, a partner at intellectual property specialists Edwin Coe, said such acts could also amount to “unlawful intrusion into the privacy of the particular celebrity”