Startups Are Racing to Commercialize DeepFakes’ Powerful, Internet-Breaking AI
A slew of startups are using AI to push the boundaries of media manipulation—and they all promise to have ethics in mind
By Mark Wilson
A little over a year ago, an anonymous Reddit user named Deepfakes changed the internet.
In early 2018, they uploaded a machine learning model that could swap one person’s face for another face in any video. Within weeks, low-fi celebrity-swapped porn ran rampant across the web. Reddit soon banned Deepfakes, but the technology had already taken root across the web—and sometimes the quality was more convincing. Everyday people showed that they could do a better job adding Princess Leia’s face to The Force Awakens than the Hollywood special effects studio Industrial Light and Magic did. Deepfakes had suddenly made it possible for anyone to master complex machine learning; you just needed the time to collect enough photographs of a person to train the model. You dragged these images into a folder, and the tool handled the convincing forgery from there. The anonymous user had sparked “a war on what’s real,” as one special effects legend described it to me last year.
