EOTO #2 DEEP FAKE

                                                                          Deep Fake

  

What is deep fake you may be wondering well? Deep fake is a face swap you either can make someone look younger or older. Or you could swap someone's face out for another one. The origin of deep fakes dates back to 2017 on Reddit when a user by the same name, deep fake created videos where the faces of celebrities primarily female celebrities like Scarlett Johansson, Gal Gadot, and others were swapped onto female adult film star in pornographic videos and images without the celebrities consent. 

To create a deep fake you need to run thousands of the two people you want to face swap into an encoder, which is an AI algorithm that would adsorb the similarities between the two faces and then begin compressing the images, getting them ready for the next step. The second stage of creating deepfakes is another AI algorithm called a decoder that would take the images or videos from the encoder and start generating the deepfakes. By reconstructing the faces of subject A and subject. The process would like this.

There is a huge debate going on about deep fake and if it is ethical. Government officials and legislatures have debated for years about deepfakes and how they can be used as weapons to slander someone or to spread misinformation about someone or something. Because of that, they are trying to find ways to fight back against deepfakes. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced back in 2019 that deepfakes are on their radar for things they have to look out for. Like most things, the government does, it takes them a while to implement laws or programs, and in 2021 DARPA's  Media Forensics program (MediFor) invented algorithms that are able to detect deepfakes. Now some states deepfakes are illegal if they are being used as slander or to spread misinformation, Texas in 2019 called TX SB751 made it illegal to make a deep fake of a candidate to sabotage them or slander them when they are running in an election. It is a Class A misdemeanor that is punishable by up to a year in jail along with fines up to $4,000. Along with this the law also punishes people for using deepfakes for cyberbullying, extortion, harassment, and revenge porn.  

A place where deep fakes have become extremely popular is Hollywood from movies to tv shows. Some of the most notable films and shows where deep fakes are used is Star Wars. One of the biggest show in the past couple of years is The Mandalorian in the season finale of season 2 used deep fake technology to de-age Mark Hamill, the actor who plays Luke Skywalker, Hamill is now 70 years old, and to make his cameo accurate to the Star Wars lore they had to de-age him so he looked like he did when he was making Star Wars Return of the Jedi. The technology on display blew people away. In the following months, a Star Wars fan by the name of Shammok uploaded an improved version of the deep fake to his Youtube channel. Lucasfilm ended up hiring him to work on deep fakes for the company and they allowed him to add his improvements to the actual into the Disney + show. Deep fake opens a whole new door of possibilities and it will be very interesting what comes out of it.