Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible.
The SIGGRAPH 2018 computer graphics and design conference is scheduled for August 12 to 16 in Vancouver, British Columbia, but we’re already getting a taste of the jaw-dropping technologies that are set to go on display.
One of these systems, dubbed Deep Video Portraits, shows the dramatic extent to which deepfake videos are improving. The manipulated Obama video from last year, developed at the University of Washington, was pretty cool, but it only involved facial expressions, and it was pretty obviously an imitation. The exercise served as an important proof-of-concept, showcasing the scary potential of deepfakes—highly realistic, computer-generated fake videos. Well, that future, as the new Deep Video Portraits technology shows, is getting here pretty damned fast.
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