In the 1997 film Face to Face (Confrontation in its English title), Nicholas Cage and John Travolta have shown how cutting-edge technology could change the face of two people in the real world. Science fiction was, and still is, but in the virtual world, doing these things comes close. Over the past few years we have seen videos in which a person’s face is changed or dialogues or scenes are created that people, actors, politicians or people from anywhere in the world, have never interpreted. It has even been used in commercials, such as the one made by the Spanish company Cruzcampo with the family of Lola Flores.
This was possible thanks to services and computers that are not accessible to everyone. A good example is the audiovisual industry, which has used this technology to rejuvenate actors and, on occasion, raise them from the grave. The same goes for voice modifications, being now possible to create a speech with the voice of a specific personwithout the said person having ever pronounced the text which was put on his lips.
Until now, it was certain that it could be done, and people could be tricked into creating these elaborate videos, but the tools, hardware and software, weren’t up to everyone. They still aren’t, but something is starting to change. Now we can do it from home with often free web tools. We’ve used some of them so you can see what can be achieved today.
nothing is real
A few decades ago, When the first televisions arrived in the country, many people greeted the newscasters when they said hello because the social convention was that if someone greeted you, you had to say hello back. Obviously, seen through today’s eyes, it was absurd and almost cute, but psychologically, it makes sense that this was the first reaction.
At that time, what was said in the programs and in the newspapers or on the radio was taken for granted, for the simple fact of having appeared in these media. We now know that blatant lies can be seen on TV and on the internet, and people aren’t so naive anymore. Seeing is believing, right? And therein lies the problem.
What’s the real one?
Retrieve
We are entering a phase of technology development in which we can begin to question what we see through a screen. It doesn’t matter if we’re watching a person do something in front of us, on a mobile or a monitor, if it looks real, it might not. The thing is, the tools needed for this are starting to make the leap to the mainstream.
there are still limits
It should be noted that today the options we have for video and image editing are not as advanced as those available in the AV industry, but it is already possible to make simple compositions without having any knowledge. It’s a similar time to cameras inside smartphones in 2003. There were models with them, but the quality was so low that anyone could tell a photo taken with a phone from a photo taken with a professional camera. Twenty years later, it’s not just that mobile cameras have managed to catch up with professionals, it’s that there are artificial intelligence systems that manage to create images that pass for photographs. It is true that even in this area there is still a lot of room for maneuver and improvement, but the speed of improvement of this technology is very high.
Something similar is happening with video editing and creation apps, which are starting to become part of larger services, such as TikTok, and are a core part of other services as well. photo editing to change faces or make our own younger or older portraits is not newThey were already talked about in 2017, and they were even updated three years later to do the same with the video, but now comes a bigger leap.
So I changed my face
But the novelty of this technology is that it is becoming easier and easier to use. In our case, we used Unboring to change my face in one video to another. In the video below these lines there is the same shot recorded with a mobile phone and the replacement of the face by that of Brad Pitt in the first example and that of Matthew Perry (Chaendler in Friends) in the second. It is striking how the system is able not only to change the face and follow the movements of the head, but also replicate facial expressions like the smile
Face swap in home video
New artificial intelligence applications are also capable of create videos from text commands, as is the case with applications like Midjourney for photos. There are services that allow you to create videos from scratch, like Gen2, although the quality is still very limited. It’s a matter of time before its performance increases.
Again, the results are not, for the moment, sufficient to deceive, but it seems like a matter of time before the technique evolves and we are able to create realistic videos with web tools. You can also do simple examples on pages like Hoodem.
Deepfake Tom Cruise and Robert D. jr.
Another way to create a video is to use Synthesia, Elai or Rephrase, services that allow generate explainer videos, perfect for business or educational environments, especially for online courses where the teacher often self-records in order to download the audio-visual material that the students can use at any time. You can choose not only the virtual avatar, but also the language in which you want the video to be generated.
But the sole purpose of these tools is not to confuse, can also be used to create artistic videos. That’s where services like Kaiber come in, giving a look concrete to the climbed parts. This type of use is perhaps the least problematic, at least politically and socially, but it will undoubtedly change the way content is created.
It is clear that society is entering a new era in which even what is seen on video cannot be taken as a reliable example that it is true. And it is also a problem in the opposite direction, because there will be many who want to avoid responsibility even after being caught on camera on the pretext that in reality it is not them, even if they look like them.
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