Deepfake Tech Eyed by Hollywood VFX Studios

On his Comedy Central show Key & Peele, Jordan Peele often played a spot-on version of former President Barack Obama, but on April 17 he released an even more dead-on impression: a video in which the Get Out director used face-swapping technology to play the former president and shine a light on how artificial intelligence is making fake news even harder to parse out from the real kind. Peele made his "ObamaPeele" video using FakeApp, a free online application that allows users to swap faces in a video with a face from another video. These so-called "Deepfakes" have, in the past few months, been used to graft stars' faces onto pornographic media and have subsequently been banned from online platforms including Reddit, Twitter and Pornhub, officially. But in Hollywood, the technology behind these viral GIFs and videos, which uses AI to swap one person's face for another, isn't going away anytime soon. For major digital effects studios, such as Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), an AI that can successfully and convincingly map a famous actor's likeness onto another performer's would save time and production costs.