Deepfake Dancing

Deepfake Dancing – Drop A Beat!

A few months ago there was the scandal revolving around Deepfakes. The tech that is a more intelligent version of faceswapping, was used to insert celebs into naughty videos. The latest way that this artificial intelligence tech is being used? Dancing. Deepfakes dancing is here and you can be the best dance in your town! (In video form at least) It uses AI to read someone elses dance moves and then copies them on to your body.

The tech is developeed by 4 researchers at UC Berkley. They wrote in a paper posted on arXiV that their system is made up of a number of steps. Firstly a video of the want to be dancer is recorded, a separate programme then analyses the moves and compiles them into a stick figure. The want to be dancer is recorded for around 20mins for the quality of transfer to be useable. Then a source video is found and a stick figure made of their movements too!  Then the swap happens. The stick figure (non dancing one) is attached to the movements of the dancing stick figure. Boom. You are now a dancer. A capabale one too.

Deepfake Dancing

Deepfake Dancing

 

Limitations

The programme is working very hard to smooth the movement of the stick figures. The reason behind this is so that upon completion the dancers don’t jerk around too much. Plus there programme is also retracing the non professional dancers face to ensure realism.

However, for the Deepfake Dancing programme to work effectively, loose clothing cannot be worn, they have to wear tight fighting clothing. As The Verge are reporting, in the video above, there is some visual artefacts. Joints of the target and source dancer don’t 100% match up. The software seems to not be able to keep up with small complex movements either for example a hand flipping from back to front.

(The Verge)

Despite all this Deepfake Dancing sounds super cool. But like most tech it could be used in a negative way! It will be interesting to see how this tech plays out and how it will be used by all in the future!

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