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 dangers of deepfakes

The dangers of deepfakes go beyond just fooling some people. If others act on what they see in deepfakes, there are huge dangers to reputation, politics, and even economics. Imagine if a large number of people were convinced by a deepfake of a declaration of war. There could be pandemonium and huge amounts of damage to international reputation before the truth was revealed. This very nearly happened recently: a deepfake of President Zelenskyy of Ukraine was spread online telling the Ukranian people to lay down arms during the Russian invasion.

Reputation

In some ways, danger to reputation sounds like the most trivial of potential dangers from deepfakes. However, reputation can be incredibly important for all kinds of things. Imagine if a person were to lose their job over a deepfake insulting their boss, or another person getting arrested when a deepfake falsely confessing to a crime is sent to the police. These effects can compound and seriously impair...