Researchers can now use AI and a photo to make fake videos of anyone

San Francisco (CNN)Researchers have come up with a method for creating realistic-looking -- but fake -- videos of anyone by using just a single image of them with a trained artificial intelligence system. It's a potentially worrisome capability in the runup to the 2020 United States presidential election, as falsified videos of candidates are expected to spread. Researchers at the Samsung AI Center in Moscow and the Moscow-based Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology explained the feat in a paper published this week to the arXiv, an online academic pre-print service. They said they were able to animate one or several photos of people by first training an AI system on a dataset of videos including many celebrities, so it could learn about key points on the face. After that, the AI system was able to combine that familiarity with one or more images of a person to come up with a convincing "talking head"-style video of them.