Book Image

Exploring Deepfakes

By : Bryan Lyon, Matt Tora
Book Image

Exploring Deepfakes

By: Bryan Lyon, Matt Tora

Overview of this book

Applying Deepfakes will allow you to tackle a wide range of scenarios creatively. Learning from experienced authors will help you to intuitively understand what is going on inside the model. You’ll learn what deepfakes are and what makes them different from other machine learning techniques, and understand the entire process from beginning to end, from finding faces to preparing them, training the model, and performing the final swap. We’ll discuss various uses for face replacement before we begin building our own pipeline. Spending some extra time thinking about how you collect your input data can make a huge difference to the quality of the final video. We look at the importance of this data and guide you with simple concepts to understand what your data needs to really be successful. No discussion of deepfakes can avoid discussing the controversial, unethical uses for which the technology initially became known. We’ll go over some potential issues, and talk about the value that deepfakes can bring to a variety of educational and artistic use cases, from video game avatars to filmmaking. By the end of the book, you’ll understand what deepfakes are, how they work at a fundamental level, and how to apply those techniques to your own needs.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Understanding Deepfakes
6
Part 2: Getting Hands-On with the Deepfake Process
10
Part 3: Where to Now?

The unethical origin of deepfakes

Deepfakes began with an unfortunately unethical beginning. The first public deepfakes were created by a Reddit user by the name of /u/Deepfakes. These first videos showing off Deepfake’s capabilities involved putting (usually) female actors into pornographic scenes. This non-consensual pornography was radically different from previous fakes in that they were more realistic, easier to create, and full video, capable of poses and expressions that the target actor had never performed in any recorded media.

Non-consensual pornographic deepfakes are not victimless events. This usage is extremely damaging as it harms the actors in profound ways. With non-consensual deepfakes being made, celebrities are losing control of their image and reputation. Unfortunately, there is no way to completely avoid the threat from deepfakes as even after proving a video isn’t actually of them, the deepfake will still be spread and objectify the actor. Some...