SIGGRAPH is coming, when all the amazeballs graphics research drops, and the previews are terrifying and astonishing by turns (sometimes both!). Read the rest

Begun, the deepfake wars have.

As usage grows of FakeApp -- the software that makes it comparatively easy to create "deepfaked" face-swapped videos -- a couple of researchers have decided to fight fire with fire. So they trained a deep-learning neural net on tons of examples of deepfaked videos, and produced a model that's better than any previous automated technique at spotting hoaxery. (Their paper documenting the work is here.)

This is good, obviously, though as you might imagine the very techniques they're using here could themselves be employed to produce better deepfakes. Technology!

As MIT Tech Review reports ...

The results are impressive. XceptionNet clearly outperforms other techniques in spotting videos that have been manipulated, even when the videos have been compressed, which makes the task significantly harder. “We set a strong baseline of results for detecting a facial manipulation with modern deep-learning architectures,” say Rossler and co.

That should make it easier to spot forged videos as they are uploaded to the web. But the team is well aware of the cat-and-mouse nature of forgery detection: as soon as a new detection technique emerges, the race begins to find a way to fool it.

Rossler and co have a natural head start since they developed XceptionNet. So they use it to spot the telltale signs that a video has been manipulated and then use this information to refine the forgery, making it even harder to detect.

It turns out that this process improves the visual quality of the forgery but does not have much effect on XceptionNet’s ability to detect it.

Deepfakes -- videos with incredibly realistic faceswapping, created with machine learning techniques -- are creepy as hell, except when they're not (then they're a form of incredibly expressive creativity with implications for both storytelling and political speech). Read the rest

Reddit has shut down /r/deepfakes, the subreddit where people collaborate to produce incredibly disturbing faceswapped pornography that uses machine-learning to put the faces of famous people who aren't pornography performers onto the bodies of people having sex in pornographic videos. Read the rest

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. Read the rest