The Technology That Will Make It Impossible for You to Believe What You See

The clip comes from researchers at the University of Washington, who developed an algorithm to take audio of someone talking and turn that into a realistic video of someone speaking those words. In the video below, you can see a side-by-side comparison of the original audio--which came from actual Obama remarks--and the generated video. Obama was a natural subject for this kind of experiment because there are so many readily available, high-quality video clips of him speaking. In order to make a photo-realistic mouth texture, researchers had to input many, many examples of Obama speaking--layering that data atop a more basic mouth shape. The researchers used what's called a recurrent neural network to synthesize the mouth shape from the audio.