Yes, the photograph is of Abraham Lincoln. And yes, it’s been colorized from the original black and white image.
Now, the famous photo has been seemingly brought to life thanks to an algorithm that has superimposed content and a voice from another video to advertise MyHeritage. To do this, the company has used technology created by D-ID, an Israeli company, one of whose founders, Gil Perry, I met a couple of years ago at Netexplo, which I’ve written about before.
The result, in this specific case, is still a tad “synthetic”, but the possibility of using a historical figure to record advertisements is a gimmick that, I have no doubt, we will soon tire of seeing.
The technology used is explained in this other video, in which several static photographs, one of which is of Perry himself, are animated using what is called a driver video, and go on to replicate extremely convincingly not only the lip movement involved in vocalizing speech but also a number of other facial gestures.
We’re now at the stage when we can take any image and superimpose on it any gesture using very convincing animation: from a photograph of a (deceased?) family member to the usual deep fakes. But the technology raises other possibilities, such as eliminating the image of a person to protect their identity, to using actors, dead or alive, to create scenes that have never been filmed, or even modifying their lip movements to improve the results when dubbing them into another language.
In another video, the CEO of the biometric and behavioral cybersecurity company BioCatch conducts an “interview” with the notorious bank robber Willie Sutton, who died more than 40 years ago, based simply on a black and white photograph of him.
This takes us beyond deepfakes: we are now talking about the possibility of taking anybody’s image and manipulating it with relative ease by making it replicate somebody else’s gestures in a video. After years trying to understand the essence of biometrics, we have now moved on to the possibility of applying deep learning to take each of its components and recreate reasonably credible synthetic images, with their grimaces, wrinkles when they laugh or gesticulate, all of which opens up possibilities of all kinds.
The speed at which biometrics and deep learning is advancing is breathtaking. We have not only been able to open up the toy; we now understand how it works, and we know how to apply it to any purpose. As a society, it may take us some time to understand that all these types of synthetic manipulations are now not only possible, but also reasonably simple.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans.
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Photo credit: MyHeritage