Deepfakes is the person credited with inventing faceswapped videos, the deeply NSFW subreddit mostly filled with faceswapped pornography starring famous non-porn performers, or generically, faceswapped videos, usually created with Fakeapp, a tool that vastly simplifies the creation of deepfakes.
Sven Charleer is part of a small group of deepfakers devoted to using the app for good — that is, using it in ways unlikely to distress (and designed to delight) the people depicted in it. He decided to swap his wife Elke's face with that of Anne Hathaway, who bears a very slight resemblance to her. He was able to give Elke an appearance on The Tonight Show, and some cameos in Get Smart with Steve Carrell, one of Elke's favorite actors.
Charleer's use is a sweet example of the manifold nature of technology, usable for delightful purposes and awful ones. He describes some of the commercial potential for this kind of thing — using faceswapping to imagine how you'd look in different clothes, for example — but there's also real potential for political speech, too. Check out this video of Donald Trump as Biff in Back to the Future 2:
(via 4 Short Links)
