Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

‘Speaking Portraits’ Make It Unsettlingly Easy to Turn Still Photos Into Animated Deepfakes

Gizmodo: “Earlier this year, social media was briefly taken over by seemingly everyone using MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia feature to bring old photos to life. The company whose AI technology powers Deep Nostalgia, D-ID, is taking that technology one step further, turning still headshot photos into videos that move and say whatever a user wants. As impressively lifelike as the results from MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia often were, the feature had its limitations. After a still photo of a person was uploaded, their orientation in the shot was analyzed to determine which direction their head and eyes were looking, at which point a matching video from a small collection of ‘driver videos’ was selected to be used as a reference to create the AI-generated movements. Users had no control over the movements in the generated video, and the subject made no attempt to speak. At the recent TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, D-ID revealed a more advanced version of Deep Nostalgia called Speaking Portraits that can make still photos appear to move and talk based on either a source video, just an audio clip, or even a text file with a pre-written script…”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.