Deepfake Technology Becoming Scarily Good, Look at Surreal Videos of Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Others

A few days ago, Science Times reported about the new deepfake technology unveiled by MyHeritage that can animate old photos of a deceased family member in an attempt to "bring them back to life."

The company showed samples of how some public figures like Queen Victoria, Mark Twain, and Florence Nightingale would have looked like when they were alive.

Indeed, artificial intelligence (AI) could transform photos into short, realistic animations that give a Harry Potter-like experience of seeing the people in photos move.

Deepfake technology has become the photoshop of the new age. MyHeritage's Deep Nostalgia recreated human faces' naturalistic movement by applying subtle movements to photographs and modifying facial expressions that move like how human faces do.

Everyone in this video is fake this is a tom cruise deepfake unbelievably cutting edge technology Screenshot from YouTube/ Tiktok Creators.

Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie

Live Science showcased animated photos of Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie from MyHeritage that definitely amused if not creeped people out.

Whether you are into artificial intellegence or not, MyHeritage's AI-generated animations bringing back faces once frozen in time will astound you. Just like the faces of Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie.

Amelia Earhart, an American aviation pioneer who is recorded as the first female aviator to fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone.

Marie Curie, was a chemist and physicist popularly known for her works on radioactivity and the discovery of Polonium and Radium.

Deepfake Technology Explained

According to Live Science, an AI creating original video footage is called a deepfake by using a method known as generative adversarial networks (GANs).

It pits two AIs against each other to produce one content, while the other evaluates how good the content was compared to real life. Over time, AIs will drive each other to be better until the AI original content is difficult to identify as fake.

The deepfake technology used in Deep Nostalgia is just a few seconds and does not include speech. MyHeritage explains that this will prevent the creation of deepfakes that are harmful to society.

Developers at Deep Nostalgia who use GANs have sets of blueprint videos showing different combinations of facial movements, such as the eyes, mouths, eyebrows, cheeks, and heads. Then the AI learned these movements and applied them to the photos of people to create an animation.

The AI assigns various sets of facial movements to the photos, which depend on the person's posture and orientation on the image.

The animations' quality could vary depending on the quality of the original photo and the person's pose in the picture. Live Science reported that the animation's quality is better when the person faces directly at the camera, resulting in a more convincing animation.

However, time has also proven that such animations or videos could be used in troubling ways. For instance, a deepfake video of Tom Cruise and other public figures has been circulating the internet lately. It shows political figures making fake speeches and even adding faces of celebrities to adult movies, according to a 2018 report of Vice.

Tom Cruise and Other Public Figures in Deepfake Videos

Recently, videos of Tom Cruise in Tiktok went viral as it can be seen that the actor is performing a magic trick, or playing golf, and others.

According to iTechPost, the public was confused at first after seeing the videos on the video-sharing app. But then realized that that was not the real Tom Cruise because the videos were all a deepfake. The three videos were posted under the new account named @deeptomcruise.

According to WION, these videos prove that deepfake has gone a long way and could be used to fake identities. Also, this shows that the world is living in dangerous times other than the ongoing pandemic.

This raises alarms and concerns from the public, which calls for social media platforms to have deepfake detectors before the technology is abused.

Check out more news and information on Deepfake in Science Times.