Rather, in the year since Citron and Chesney published their article (and two years after Roose published his), deepfake creation has become so easy that I basically matched the Times’s project on my iPhone. I’m hardly more technologically skilled than Roose or his Times colleague-and certainly less so than Derpfakes. For better or worse, deep-fake technology will diffuse and democratize rapidly.”Ĭitron and Chesney were prescient. Danielle Citron and Bobby Chesney cautioned in 2019 that “he capacity to generate persuasive deep fakes will not stay in the hands of either technologically sophisticated or responsible actors. The entire thing took me about 10 minutes.Įxperts did warn us about the inevitable democratization of deepfake creation. Yet my project, however flawed the end result may be, yielded at least as convincing a product as Roose’s deepfakes. I entered 416 fewer pictures than Roose did for actor Ryan Gosling and 1,860 fewer than he did for actor Chris Pratt. I undertook the whole experiment from my nearly three-year-old iPhone SE that’s missing the top-right corner of its screen. Roose expensed $85.96 in Google Cloud Platform credits I didn’t spend a dime. Needless to say, Roose’s project was far more involved than mine. Of the former, Roose conceded, “Only the legally blind would mistake the person in the video for me.”įrom left: Roose being photographed, Roose as actor Ryan Gosling, Roose as actor Chris Pratt and Roose as comedian Jimmy Kimmel. One deepfake took eight hours of training to produce another had to be run overnight. Roose and his Times colleague also fed the software images of the celebrities on whose faces Roose sought to superimpose his own. Roose and his Times colleague’s rented server “provided enough processing power to cut the time frame down to hours, rather than the days or weeks it might take on laptop.” To help the software-which “teaches itself to perform image-recognition tests through trial and error”-learn an accurate model of Roose’s face, they took “several hundred” photos of Roose’s face in all sorts of expressions. Roose explained his process: “The first step is to find, or rent, a moderately powerful computer,” in order to reduce the amount of time it takes the software to churn out a fake. So he recruited a technologist from the Times and a Redditor who went only by the alias “Derpfakes.” Roose and his team used a free downloadable computer program called FakeApp, which functions thanks to machine learning software. Roose noticed a flood of deepfakes and wanted to try the technology on himself. Way back in March 2018, Kevin Roose of the New York Times undertook a similar project to my Seth Meyers gambit. The era of the deepfake apps has arrived. An iPhone-created deepfake tweeted by an anonymous user with only 60,000 followers received a presidential retweet within an hour of posting. iPhone deepfake apps have made creating deceptive media easier than ever. But that barrier to entry has begun to erode. I just downloaded an app like Mug Life, took a selfie, selected a gif of Meyers and voila:ĭeepfake creation used to require a serious computer and a good baseline of technological skill. I didn’t brainstorm standup routines or practice public speaking in an effort to emulate the late-night TV host. While many of you have spent your initial period in quarantine trying to become bakers, yogis or knitters, I spent mine trying to become late night comedian Seth Meyers. It turns out I know a fair bit about Mug Life. The watermark on the bottom right-hand corner of the Biden gif, “,” indicates that the gif came from Mug Life, an app that allows users to manipulate a still image of a person’s face. I’ve been attempting to learn more about the democratization of what are called “deepfakes”-convincing videos that superimpose someone’s face on an already-existing video or photo or otherwise manipulate media to make it appear as if someone did or said something that never actually happened. Writing in the Atlantic, David Frum noted the significance of the president’s retweet: “Instead of sharing deceptively edited video-as Trump and his allies have often done before-yesterday Trump for the first time shared a video that had been outrightly fabricated.”īut Trump’s action in sharing this particular video has a special resonance for me, because it was made with one of the iPhone apps I’ve been playing around with for the past month. The president’s use of this gif is already coming in for criticism. You can tell it's a deep fake because Jill Biden isn't covering for him. Like many Americans, I woke up this morning to see that the president had retweeted a misleading gif of his presumptive Democratic challenger, Joe Biden:
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