rnimmer
FTA: "Ethical Use Safeguards

Built-in checks prevent processing of inappropriate content, ensuring legal and ethical use."

I see it claims to not process content with nudity, but all of the examples on the website demo impersonation of famous people, including at least one politician (JD Vance). I'm struggling to understand what the authors consider 'ethical' deepfaking? What is the intended 'ethical' use case here? Of all the things you can build with AI, why this?

cs702
Well, I understand how it works, and I still find it freaking amazing. The quality is... impressive.

On the flip side, the ability to deep-fake a face in real time on a video call is now accessible to pretty much every script kiddie out there.

In other words, you can no longer trust what your eyes see on video calls.

We live in interesting times.

Stagnant
Looks like this project is a fork of the discontinued roop[0] with primarily some UI improvements. One of roop's main developers has been working on facefusion[1] for the past year and it produces by far the most convincing results from the ones i've seen and it also supports real time webcam face swapping.

0: https://github.com/s0md3v/roop/

1: https://github.com/facefusion/facefusion

RafelMri
Interesting... This project is built upon "GFPGAN v1.4" (https://github.com/TencentARC/GFPGAN) and "FaceSwap Extension - Automatic 1111 - Proof of Concept" (https://github.com/revolverocelot1/-webui-faceswap-unlocked). The GFPGAN project is grounded on its own in the paper "GFP-GAN: Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior" by Wang et al. (https://xinntao.github.io/projects/gfpgan)
nope1000
Technically impressive but I fail to see a good use case for it that's not related to propaganda or scam and the website doesn't seem to list one either.
Willingham
Just need to add voice augmentation and every grandma and grandpa in the world will have their bank accounts cleaned out! Better go warn mine now! XD
XorNot
A practical use of this would be to animate your face onto a CGI model which was independently posed for the purposes of video meetings - which is something I've always wanted.

Let me separate my face, body and words and craft the experience.

KaiserPro
Is there a legitimate usecase for this?

Like when they were brainstorming this as a product, what was the persona/vertical they were targeting?

doctorhandshake
This makes me think there could be use for a very very (very) easy-to-use tool that allows two parties to choose and store a secret (verbally pronounceable) passphrase known only to the two of them, for use in situations in which it might be necessary to ‘sign’ a video chat or audio conversation in which one party’s identity might be in doubt.
declan_roberts
"Built-in checks prevent processing of inappropriate content, ensuring legal and ethical use."

A software engineer says to himself, if only I could keep these guns from jumping off the table and shooting people.

dpweb
Facinating software although I hope the idea "we're gonna rely on people to be good humans and DO THE RIGHT THING" is quickly abandoned and instead there is just as robust development of detection software that goes along with newer and better deep fake tools.
araes
Huh. Thought politics was dead with VASA-1 [1], EMO [2], and Animate / Outfit anyone [3], so we could clothe people in anything, animate them any way we want, put them anywhere, and have them say anything to the public. "Thoughts and prayers victims..."

However, this really nails that pretty dead itself. Wonder if I can:

- Sit at home in pajamas.

- Change my face to Sec. of Def. Lloyd Austin.

- Put myself in a nice suit from TV

- Call the White House with autotune voice pretending to be going in for surgery yet again because of life threatening complications

- Send the entire military into conniptions (maybe mention some dangerous news I need to warn them about before the emergency rush surgery starts)

Edit: This [4] might be an Animate / Outfit anyone image... It's difficult to tell. Even with huge amounts of experience, the quality has become too elevated, too quick to check 1000's of depressing murder images for fakes because it might be a BS heart string story. All stories on the WWW are now, "that might be fake, unless I can personally check." Al-arabiya upvoted casinos and lotteries for muslims recently. [5] "they all might be fake."

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/

[2] https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/

[3] https://humanaigc.github.io/animate-anyone/

[4] https://www.reuters.com/resizer/v2/https%3A%2F%2Fcloudfront-...

[5] https://english.alarabiya.net/News/gulf/2024/07/29/uae-grant...

cdrini
It's really getting to the point where multimedia online shouldn't be trusted unless it's from a reputable source and cross verified.

I wonder, is there a universe where maybe cameras are updated to add some sort of digital signature to videos/photos to indicate they are real and haven't been tampered with? Is that feasible/possible? I'm not skilled with cryptography stuff to know, but if we can digital sign documents with some amount of faith...

I've heard folks mention trying to tag AI photos/videos, but it seems like tagging non-AI photos/videos is more feasible?

jader201
I feel like this is one step closer to the Black Mirror episode where the grieving widow orders an AI version of her late husband.

And I don’t say this with excitement.

mikkom
This is getting scary to be honest

And this is the worst quality it will ever be. In the future it will be impossible to know who we are talking with online.

FredPret
I think AI + deepfakes will increase the value pressure on in-person interactions - ie, the only time when you can (for now) believe your eyes and ears.

I wonder how politics can be transacted in such an environment. Old-timey first-past-the-post might be the optimal solution if you can't trust anything from out of earshot.

goda90
How long until we see "anti-cheat"-like software to try to detect this stuff for video chatting?
kshri24
I am not at all comfortable with this. Even though it is an amazing demo I feel the release of this tool could not have been more ill-timed. It has all the potential of wrecking US elections this year. I don't really know what the optimal release time should have been but I don't see how this can be used for good at all. And I am still just considering implications of this restricted to elections. I am not even going to think about what it would mean to child porn, terrorism and even entire assassinations orchestrated to destabilize a Government leading to Civil/World Wars. Lots of things can go wrong with this tech.
xnx
https://github.com/C0untFloyd/roop-unleashed does this for free on your own computer
raflueder
I can see this changing how people interact over video calls, we might start having to exchange a "key phrase" whenever we join a call, so that both sides can make sure the person on the other side is who they say they are (or appear to be), even within families, perhaps not yet but soon enough. Crazy times.
illnewsthat
What’s the technical difference in how this works vs. previous face swapping tech (like Snapchat filters)?
sylware
That will be funny once those neural nets can be infered on a normal person beefy workstation (or a few of them). Just thei "ethical" goes down the drain.

It is already ez to run text troll AIs on normal workstations... so...

hackernewds
where are all these "wow impressive" comments coming from? clicking "Get Started" dumps you into a loop of landing on the home page
chefandy
Well, this will make for some "interesting" viral campaign fodder.
maxglute
Next 3 months is going to get interesting.
freeone3000
The future of v-tubers is here
paul7986
Neil DeGrasse Tyson says it best the Internet will die because of this type of technology https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AxM2XTwaaUA

AI will kill the Internet we know today and the new one im guessing you will have to have a Internet license attached to your identity which is backed by your internet reputation which you always want to keep it high for veracity/validity! You can still post anonymously but it wont hold as much weight compared to you posting using your verified Internet identity. This idea of mine i posted good number of times here and it gets downvoted but with the IRS in bed with ID.Me (elon musk is involved with them in some capacity) you can see what i mention with ID.me and the IRS being a small step in this direction. Otherwise no one uses the Internet (zero trust of it) .. it dies and we go back to reading books and meeting in person (doesnt sound all that bad yet ive never read a book before).

hankchinaski
Now the question is, what is the use case that does not entail misinformation or personal amusement?
zug_zug
Technologically seems cool, and the first use that pops into mind is "wouldn't this be funny to prank my friend?"

But maybe no, it wouldn't. Maybe it'd be deeply disconcerting. We have very strong norms around honesty as a society, and maybe crossing them in video just for a joke is comparably crass to giving somebody a fake winning lottery ticket.

haxiomic
I miss the recent past where new tech felt exciting and inspiring but for the last few years new developments are often coupled with an anxiety for the new harms possible and often unclear benefits. I wonder how much is 'inevitable', at large enough scale we will always exploring new possibility spaces as they become available and how much is our choosing – we put resources to build these things in full awareness because we think they bring value over focusing on other things. I realise though it is useful for society to develop understanding and defences for these things early

I've notice I've steadily become more ashamed to be associated with tech. I'm still processing how to react to this and what to choose to work on in response

Am I in a bubble? Do you share similar feelings or are yours quite different? I am very curious

mandibeet
[dead]
blini2077
Deep Live Cam is a cutting-edge AI tool that enables real-time face replacement in videos or images using just a single photo. Perfect for video production, animation, and more.