[White Out 403]

https://gizmodo.com/samsung-now-has-...deo-1834979187

Fake videos are getting really damn good, and now they’re getting even easier to make. For innocuous purposes like, say, a moving avatar, it’s a pretty cool development. But for more insidious use cases, like exploiting the technology to harass someone online, it’s unsettling.

Researchers at the Samsung AI Center at Moscow and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology published a paper—Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models—on Monday that illustrated how their system can create a virtual talking head with a little photo. While researchers have, over the last year, put out a number of new ways to create deepfakes—in which someone uses machine learning to create an ultrarealistic fake video of someone—there’s still been one crucial prerequisite to make one. You need to collect a bunch of images of an individual to generate a realistic deepfake of them.

Of course, this isn’t impossible to do if you have an open-source photo-scraping tool and that person has posted enough public photos or videos of themselves online. But it was still a roadblock and one that afforded those who might be a victim the ability to be more careful about how much exploitable data they might share online. But this new system frees someone up from what was once a necessary and time-consuming step.

But it would be irresponsible to exalt this technology without pointing to the very real threat it poses to victims of manipulated videos. In fact, when deepfakes first entered the public consciousness, it was only a matter of time before the tech was weaponized against women online. The bleak reality is that there will always be ####ty people online who will exploit this type of technology, and as tech goes, there will always be people trying to make it easier and more efficient.

Well, this is equally terrifying and cool.