Samsung reveals tech that turns your profile photos into 3D DeepFakes

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF: You don't have to be a celebrity any longer to be turned into a DeepFake, now noone's safe.

Recently China unveiled the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) news anchor, and Soul Machines showed off their latest and greatest “Digital Human” avatars, one of which is now teaching students. But as researchers get better at creating DeepFakes, and what I call “Synthetic Content,” an exciting yet nefarious technology, the tech that I first showcased over three years ago now that’s driving these trends is, as expected, coming on leaps and bounds - and fast.

From tech that lets you create fake news, and synthetic videos from nothing more than just text, to tech that lets you create full body DeepFakes, and convincing virtual bloggers that are earning millions of dollars, all the way through to new tech that lets you create realistic game environments using your voice, and other tech that lets you generate new, complex, Virtual Reality worlds in real time – it should be patently clear to everyone that Pandora’s Box has now been opened. And there’s no going back, synthetic content is here to stay, and, as fun as it can be, soon we’ll have genuine problems distinguishing real content from fake content – something that 60 percent of American’s already say they’re having trouble doing.

Now though in the latest development in the field imagine someone creating a convincing DeepFake video of you, doing and saying whatever, simply by stealing your Facebook profile picture.
The bad guys don't have this technology in their hands quite yet but they’re not that far behind the curve, especially now that Samsung’s Russian AI lab has figured out how to do it and published a paper on their work.

Software for creating DeepFakes, that are fabricated clips that make people appear to do or say things they never did, usually requires big data sets of images in order to create a realistic forgery but as the technology becomes more mature, cheaper, and more available it will only be a matter of time until a bad actor ,or set of bad actors, get their hands on it. After which chaos ensues.

Now Samsung has developed a new AI system that can generate a fake clip by feeding their software with as little as one photo.
The technology, of course, can be used for fun, like bringing a classic portrait to life as you can see in the videos, for example, the Mona Lisa, which exists solely as a single still image is animated in three different clips to demonstrate the new technology. But here's the downside - these kinds of technologies and their almost exponential rate of development also create risks of misinformation, election tampering and fraud, according to Hany Farid, a Dartmouth researcher who, like an increasing number of researchers, specialises in media forensics to root out DeepFakes.