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Television Technology

Ask Slashdot: Will Future TVs Be Able To DeepFake Actor Faces In Realtime? 65

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
dryriver writes: We've all seen the DeepFake videos on Youtube, where a different actor's face from the original is digitally inserted into a film scene. Some of these DeepFakes are actually quite convincing. DeepFakes are currently computationally intensive, but may one day happen in realtime on hardware custom made to accelerate the process. Now to the question: Will this "digital face swapping" be a realtime feature in future TVs some day? Will people be able to say to their TV "I don't like this actor/actress. Replace him/her with _actorname_ please"? Or watch a 100 Million Dollar movie with their own face on an actor's body, essentially making the TV owner the star of the movie playing? Will this perhaps become so normal some day that people in the future look back at our era and say "In those days, you couldn't choose which actors to watch any given piece of content with. Technology wasn't as advanced as it is today back then."?
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Ask Slashdot: Will Future TVs Be Able To DeepFake Actor Faces In Realtime? More

Ask Slashdot: Will Future TVs Be Able To DeepFake Actor Faces In Realtime?

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  • No (Score:1)

    by spcebar ( 2786203 )
    Because that's stupid.

    • Why?

      • Because Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu will do it for you. Maybe even Disney (they probably already own every likeness of anyone in their movies).

      • Because right now it takes weeks of GPU time to train the machine to merge the faces. You need thousands to tens of thousands of images of both faces, at all sorts of angles and lighting with all of the facial expressions, mouth movements, eyebrows moving, etc.

        Even if our processing power increases a thousandfold, just having a large enough of a training set is a problem. It's not something that you tend to have for anyone who's not really famous with hundreds of hours of time on camera.

        While it might be po

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Maybe in future they will film the show with tracking dots on the actors' faces so that it's easier to swap in pre-prepared face textures.

          I'd like to see some shows come back with new actors replacing the old ones. Wouldn't even have to do a deepfake. Star Trek Continues is a great example of how that can work.

    • I wouldn't call it stupid.
      I can see it as a great way to increase TV resolution without increasing broadcast bandwidth.

      With 4k-8k, 16k displays the screen resolutions are going up exponentially. while broadcast bandwidth is more linear. Having a CPU real-time render images in these high resolutions could use less bandwidth than current compressed video can.

      The reason why we were able to have 4k displays currently is due to video compression algorithms because we will a gigabit connection to get the display

    • Because that's stupid.

      Not so fast!

      Think of the Pr0n possibilities alone!

  • . . . but replace their bodies with Hentai figures.

    This action might even save the doomed "Cats" movie.

    And I might even finally watch some Disney flicks if I could do this.

    As they are, I find them too sugary-sweet gooey-cutesy. Disney should go back to their roots, and cruelly kill Bambi's mother and other lovable stars in the film.

    • . . . but replace their bodies with Hentai figures.

      This action might even save the doomed "Cats" movie.

      And I might even finally watch some Disney flicks if I could do this.

      As they are, I find them too sugary-sweet gooey-cutesy. Disney should go back to their roots, and cruelly kill Bambi's mother and other lovable stars in the film.

      There are those who would say that "Cats" the movie already has actor's faces on Hentai bodies.

    • Hey, why is there a tentacle sliding up behind Taylor Swift? Whats going on .. OH MY GOD!!

  • Maybe for the redneck double-wide crowd, who are goin' "hey Martha, come see Taylor Swift's face on that-there girl from Fifty Shades of Grey." It seems to me that anyone with an appreciation of film would be dissatisfied by such deepfakes. The face may be someone else but the body still is not. The actor will still look and move and have the mannerisms consistent with the original actor, not the face rivited on.

    • Maybe for the redneck double-wide crowd, who are goin' "hey Martha, come see Taylor Swift's face on that-there girl from Fifty Shades of Grey." It seems to me that anyone with an appreciation of film would be dissatisfied by such deepfakes. The face may be someone else but the body still is not. The actor will still look and move and have the mannerisms consistent with the original actor, not the face rivited on.

      Agreed. And there are actually awards for mastery of the acting craft - the Oscars for best/supporting actor and actress key among them. If you put another face on, say, Francis McDormand in 3 Billboards, it's just not going to be the same. Nor if you were to replace Woody Harrelson in that same flick for that matter.

      In movies where casting doesn't matter, sure have at it. In other movies casting is everything and AI is not going to replicate that depth of emotion anytime soon.

    • What's one of the biggest expenses in a blockbuster film? Paying multi-million dollar actors.

      Technology like this will allow anyone to play a part in a movie, then you just plaster a synthetic face over them. The copyright and trademark on the synth face will be owned by the movie studio [engadget.com], allowing them to own and control the fame generated for starring in a successful movie. Actors will be paid according to their acting ability, but because their real face is never seen and there are a lot more good ac

      • What's one of the biggest expenses in a blockbuster film? Paying multi-million dollar actors.

        Just wait till the AI wants to unionize :-)

        Seriously, while the OP's question deals with real time processing in the TV, we don't really need to wait for TVs to have the processing power for this. The state of CGI is pretty close that we could probably replace all the actors in TV and movies with convincing fakes now. Maybe we could do the same with music too.......

        Hopefully I will be gone by the time virtual entertainers dominate all humanity's artistic endeavors.

        • Just wait till the AI wants to unionize :-)

          AI will probably require some kind of electrochemistry for the foreseeable future, so that would be a bad idea.

      • SAG wouldn't allow Hollywood studios to do what you're suggesting so it's a non-starter.

    • It seems to me that anyone with an appreciation of film would be dissatisfied by such deepfakes.

      Trust me, you don't know this audience. Their "appreciation of film" revolves how bouncy the tits are, and that's about as far as it goes. They'd pay for this.

      Wanna put your hot, barely-legal neighbor in your favorite skin flick? Maybe a co-worker? Your kid's teacher?

      Believe me, there are plenty of people who would pay for this kind of thing.

      • It seems to me that anyone with an appreciation of film would be dissatisfied by such deepfakes.

        Trust me, you don't know this audience. Their "appreciation of film" revolves how bouncy the tits are, and that's about as far as it goes. They'd pay for this.

        Wanna put your hot, barely-legal neighbor in your favorite skin flick? Maybe a co-worker? Your kid's teacher?

        Believe me, there are plenty of people who would pay for this kind of thing.

        I see the pr0n possibilities. And of course, new technology is driven by pr0n.

        I weep for my fellow humans.

  • The "original actor" might have been an AI-actor as well. But it's not enough to inly swap faces, as seen in the recent "Irishman" - sure, the actors faces look younger but their body posture and movement telegraph "old geezer"
    • You'd have to swap the complete persona, mannerism, height, movement, speech pattern, etc... or mix them up... but i'm more and more convinced that in future such things will be synthesized similar to deep fakes rather than made with 3d animation. Maybe the whole image will be, some day.

      • Maybe the whole image will be, some day.

        That's Hollywood's Official Wet Dream: 100% synthesized actors who don't have to be paid, but who can be licensed forever. And the mix & match possibilities are endless. Let the crossovers begin!

  • Mr & Mrs Everywhere (Score:3)

    by david.emery ( 127135 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @04:03PM (#59554444)

    From John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] "Another is a kind of interactive television that shows the viewer as part of the program ("Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere")." The book was written in 1968, taking place in 2010. So looks like Brunner was off by a decade for this particular technology.

  • Will Future AIs Be Able To DeepFake Slashdot Articles In Realtime?

    • Will Future AIs Be Able To DeepFake Slashdot Articles In Realtime?

      Already being done. I am curious if a sophisticated enough AI could one day be developed to catch Slashdot dupes. (I personally doubt it.)

  • Unless humanity halts scientific advances and starts into a permanent descent or just wipes itself out, of course. How long it will take is the only question.

    This one is probably not that far. It's a trivial advancement.

    The real future I'd like to see is when AI can create a story that I'm guaranteed to enjoy based on its up to the moment knowledge of me and then creates and shows it to me in real-time making real-time adjustments per my reactions. That one is a certainty too. Just a matter of when.

    • That's a little too passive for me. Also, it might tend to end up in a feedback loop like Youtube recommendations, unable to bring in novelty and just homing in on what it thinks it you are looking for specifically until everything it provides you is indistinguishable. I'd like to be able to breed my media. Take say Star Wars and combine it with Smokey and the Bandit, and see the different ways it would turn out. Would you get Smokey and the Bandit in space or Star Wars with car chases? Who would the AI re

  • DeepFakes are currently computationally intensive, but may one day happen in realtime on hardware custom made to accelerate the process.

    First, there is literally no incentive for any industry to develop this hardware.

    Second, custom ICs are expensive. Additional functionality is being added to "smartTVs" only because it can all be done in software. No additional parts are added to enable what could be computationally intensive features.

    Third, this is a really dumb question and you should be embarrassed to have wasted people's time on it.

    • You mean there is no reason for any industry, *not* to develop live lying aka marketig aka PR aka lobbyism aka TV experts aka politics aka $youNameIt [dilbert.com] technology?

    • First, there is literally no incentive for any industry to develop this hardware.

      LOL, those are some famous last words if I ever heard 'em.

      Replace "hardware" with practically anything and that's what you're living in today. Cars, planes, cell phones, Spotify, streaming services, video doorbells, microwave meals, FM radio, Pet Rocks, GrubHub, etc. etc. etc.

      Someone will pay for it, and that's the only incentive any company needs to develop something. In this case, "build it and they will come" is almost a no-brainer.

      • Why buy an unreliable automobile with its noxious fuel when we have horses? Besides carriage makers and buggywhip makers aren't going to just give up their livelihood to make way for this so-called progress. Maybe these automobiles will have important niche uses, but anyone can plainly see they'll never become our main form of transport.

  • In addition to any intra-frame parallelization, this is completely parallelizable at the frame level if you don't need to make an adjustment to the movement. If you can afford the crunch and can accept a one-frame latency you could do it right now. That would work fine for movies an live feeds. (We have that now with the compression algorithms and things like satellite radio's two-copy several-second delayed retransmission, to cover short outages like going under overpasses and through other dead spots.)

    • ... this is completely parallelizable at the frame level if you don't need to make an adjustment to the movement.

      Or otherwise look ahead to avoid some visible mistake.

      • There is always a 10-15 minute delay, "for security reasons" (aka covering yo ass). So for this very purpose.

        The question is, what you've got ready to fix things in those 10-15 minutes.

    • Semi-custom chips where you just throw the weights for your face in, could do it in whatever the length of the wires is the signal has to travel through. Given a modern fab, that is anywhere between nothing and no time at all. ;)

  • People will be able to put their own face on popular movie actor.

    • Sex with your spouse - only you both have headsets that replace each others faces and bodies with the celebrity of your respective choices in real time.

      I think I should start working on the venture capital pitch.

  • Why then, do they all look and act so fake and plastic?

    Surely, you are not suggesting there are real people like that out there! ... ;)

  • In the future, a TV programme will just be a series of instructions that the Player reproduces. That way the makers can simply update it whenever they wish. Every day items in the programme can be sponsored and swapped with impunity, lines of scripts can be updated so it remains current. It'll never get old.

    Huge chunks of old programmes, thousands of hours, will be re-created as nostalgia

    At first, these facilities will be done by the Producers in-house and watched by the Masses as we currently do today. But

    • "In the future, a TV programme will just be a series of instructions that the Player reproduces."

      Multiple Identity Drag-In Instructions (MIDI)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Hate ro break it to you, but digitsl video dies this ( ok on a 2d grid) already , after the de cryption (drm) and mpeg/hvec decoder the bitstream lassed to rhe sispkry driver chips is an exact set up instructions on hove to recreate n frames/second ( usualy 25 or 39 /second for broadcast tv). But this beeing slashdot it’s a relatiivly good chance. this post is redundant, So Why did I post it?..... no idea. Annyway local real time deap fake at a price point compatible whith s mass marcet TV Is prob

  • Yes (Score:3)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @07:04PM (#59554822) Journal

    Yes, because $$$$$$

  • 'Smart TVs' are anything but.
    I just want POTV (Plain Old TV). Basically a monitor with HDMI inputs and a tuner for OTA broadcast. I'll add what else I want externally.
  • In films, though, the main thing is the play of actors. I don't think robots are going to be better in the role of Stogone. And the cast is selected in the films. If you swap one actor for another it is not a fact that the overall picture of the film and the idea will be saved. I like other digital technologies. This is IPTV. I've connected a set top box https://www.infomir.eu/eng/pro... [infomir.eu] to my TV and enjoy amazing movies. All the same in Hollywood know a lot about cinema.
  • I think that video games will be first. Netflix (maybe) will be second...

  • is whether, in the future, robots will be able to abduct (rescue) people and deprogram them from the cult of celebrity worship. Teach the rescuees how to not give a shit what clothes some manufactured idol is wearing, who they're fucking, what stupid crap they do or say, what products they endorse, or anything else about them.

  • Models are getting plastic surgery, computer scanned, and then killed. This way their likenesses can be used in perpetuity without paying them. It's interesting that the concept is now almost a reality.

    The movie really isn't that good and has two major plot holes...

    1) The models are computer scanned and then told what features they need to have a plastic surgeon change. After the surgery they are then rescanned. Why can't the computer just make the millimeter changes on it's own?

    2) They have computer genera

  • No (Score:2)

    by Kjella ( 173770 )

    The problem is not well-defined. Plain texture swaps are well defined but geometric distortions are not. For example imagine a couple kissing, if you swap them for shorter/taller actors either the lips are off, the character models is distorted or the kiss needs to be fully re-imagined. If you look at deepfake videos they generally avoid any kind of interaction, it's just talking heads.

  • No. Not your TV. DRM won't allow it. But maybe on your PC someday.

  • This is really terrible horrible technology and they should have some responsibility.

  • Because it's passive entertainment. How many people actually use things they can use TODAY, like different aspect ratios or alternative angles on DVD/Blu-ray? TV is a mindless couch-surfing exercise, while making editorial decisions is hard work. Even if the technology existed most consumers wouldn't use it after playing with it once or twice, just as putting mustaches on your co-workers during a video conference call gets old fast. The vast majority of viewers (and others viewing the same screen--like the

  • Given that the future (indeed the present) of entertainment delivery is streaming, why put this code on the local terminal? Makes much more sense to have Netflix et al doing it in their server farm, for a variety of reasons. For example, if you do this processing in the TV, you need more horsepower in the TV, and you also need storage space to hold downloaded models. You probably also have to wait some irritating length of time to download a new model. From the rightsholder perspective, if you have all the

  • there is supposedly more to acting than good looks.

  • ... in Being John Malkovitch?
  • Dear Deepfake:

    Please change this movie to be something interesting.

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