The advancements in communication technology in the last few years have brought down the costs significantly. It has provided ease of access to the internet to the maximum number of people. This increase in internet usage in the world has increased the entertainers also. Social media websites provide a platform for every user to share anything they want. Creating and sharing memes is the most common form of entertaining other people on social networks, and there are many types of memes. One such form of memes is Deepfakes.
What is a Deepfake
Deepfake is a viral meme and synthetic media in which a person’s look in an image or video is replaced by someone else’s look. It means you replace your ‘look’ in a video or an image with someone else’s ‘look’ — like with that of some celebrity. Surprisingly, it is also easy and completely free to create Deepfakes. These media manipulation tools are based on artificial intelligence and are available for free over the web.
Grace Windheim, a YouTuber, made a video tutorial to make a meme using Deepfakes. On one level, this media manipulation phenomenon may be entertaining and ‘good’ for parody but is also raising concerns about its potential misuse. This method has already been used to harass people, especially women, by swapping their faces into adult videos. Though they still look fake and are obviously fake too, but the technology may improve in the future.
The YouTuber also says that the tools can be used to make any type-of Deepfake that makes it susceptible to abuse. She also points out that there is a very ‘thin’ line between using Deepflakes for memes and to harm.
Deepfakes Algorithm is Open Source
After the Deepfake video of a YouTuber lip-synching to a song called “Baka Mitai” went viral, many other internet users used that video to create Deepfakes. Deepfakes with the faces of Barack Obama and Thanos singing the song went viral. These Deepfakes were created using a particular Deepfake algorithm that came from a 2019 research paper. The research paper was presented at NeurIPS, the largest annual AI conference. Many memes are circulating over the internet on various social media platforms, especially TikTok.
