Memers are making deepfakes, and things are getting weird – MIT Technology Review

The particular deepfake algorithm that people were using comes from a 2019 research paper presented at NeurIPS, the largest annual AI research conference. Unlike other, more complex algorithms, it allows a user to take any video of a persons face and use it to animate a photo of someone elses face with only a few lines of code.

Windheim found the open-source algorithm in a YouTube tutorial and ported it into a Google Colab notebook, a free service for running code in the cloud. After a few tries, aided by the skills shed picked up in the occasional coding class in college, she got the script to spit out a deepfake video. She then synched the song to the video with Kapwings tools, creating a new version of the meme.

Since she posted her tutorial on Kapwings YouTube channel, a number of other YouTubers have also made tutorials using the same copy-and-pasted algorithm. The difference: many of them are teaching their audience how to make any kind of deepfake meme. One even teaches people how to make them on mobile.

These memes are now appearing everywhere on social media: on Twitter, Instagram, and especially TikTok. The platforms short videos, which often feature snappy choreography to catchy music, are particularly conducive to being deepfaked to mesmerizing effect. The #deepfake hashtag in the app has already racked up more than 120 million views.

Theres a telltale wonkiness to the faces in the videos made with this algorithm, which makes its handiwork easy to recognize; that is part of the deepfakes humor. These imperfectionsand the surrealist quality of the memeswill keep them from being confused for reality. At the moment, more hyper-realistic deepfakes are far more technically challenging and computationally expensive to create.

But at the rate that the technology is advancing, easy-to-make deepfakes that are nearly indistinguishable from reality are likely around the corner. Some companies like Chinese tech giant Tencent, owner of WeChat, have publicly announced their intentions to invest more resources into advancing the state of the art for commercial applications.

Deepfakes are not inherently bad. The technology has already been used by artists, educators, and others as a powerful new tool for creative expression. In February, for example, Time magazine used deepfakes to re-create the experience of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his I Have a Dream speech in virtual reality. Ultimately, regulators need to define what is appropriate use and what could lead to harm.

For now, Windheim is relying on her own judgment to make that call. Before posting her video, she read up on the implications of deepfakes and had a conversation with her colleagues. Were never intending our products to help users spread misinformation, she says, so we just wanted to sanity-check ourselves.

In the end, they decided on some ground rules: they would focus their tutorials on making specific memes, never on creating deepfakes outside of that context. As long as its entertainment and within meme culture, she says, were in the clear zone.

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Memers are making deepfakes, and things are getting weird - MIT Technology Review