Generative artificial intelligence (AI) could create your digital doppelgänger all too easily.
AI tools have been learning to create faces for decades. In fact, faces were the first thing used to test their abilities, for several reasons.
For one thing, faces are similar in structure and layout – great for those early AIs to learn from. There’s also plenty of pictures of faces available online. And more data means it’s easier for the AI to learn.
But faces were also chosen due to our familiarity with them, which is key for judging the AIs’ work. The human brain recognises and understands faces extremely well, but may struggle to tell if the details in an AI-generated image of a landscape or building are correct.
As such, research papers that demonstrated AIs capable of generating realistic fake faces always attracted attention.
The result is that over the years, AIs have become specialists in faces. Today they’re so proficient that they can take a live video of your face, figure out exactly where all the features lie and seamlessly swap them with another pre-learned face. Perhaps of a celebrity or a politician.
You can alter the lighting or even pull silly faces and those effects will be convincingly duplicated by the ‘deepfake’ face.
Alternatively, given a few images of your face from various angles to use as training data, an AI can generate a double of your face to overlay onto someone else’s. With an AI doppelgänger like this, anyone can effectively become you.
And it costs nothing – the technology is freely available to anyone with the know-how to install and run it on an ordinary computer.
Creating a digital doppelgänger today might need a certain level of proficiency, but it won’t be long before you’ll find software out there that anyone can use. These are scary times for privacy and authentication.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Julian Fisher, via email) 'How easily could AI create a digital doppelgänger of me?'
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