Programmer’s Real-Time Deepfake Lets Him Impersonate Elon Musk on Zoom

Motherboard reports on a new open source program “that superimposes someone else’s face onto yours in real-time, during video meetings.”
Programmer Ali Aliev used the open-source code from the “First Order Motion Model for Image Animation,” published on the arxiv preprint server earlier this year [and developed by researchers at the University of Trento in Italy as well as Snap]… With other face-swap technologies, like deepfakes, the algorithm is trained on the face you want to swap, usually requiring several images of the person’s face you’re trying to animate. This model can do it in real-time, by training the algorithm on similar categories of the target (like faces)… Aliev made a video of himself as Elon Musk, pretending to join the wrong meeting, to demonstrate the tech. It’s pretty clear that it’s a fake, but the eyes and head move around well enough that it’d be a neat trick for a few seconds, before the rest of the call looks any closer. He’s released his program on GitHub, naming it “Avatarify”. But Motherboard warns it requires “a bit of programming knowledge” plus a powerful gaming PC. “You have to run Zoom or Skype, as well as streaming software and Avatarify at the same time, which takes a decent amount of computing power.”