If you’re a previous visitor, you’ll know I don’t do serious. If you’re here first time because of this clickbait titled article, then you’ll have to take my word for it. And for Gods sake don’t stray off this article elsewhere. You WILL regret it. I promise you.
But I digress. I have serious things to say in a probably not so serious way. You see, there’s some stuff that no one is directly talking about and it literally potentially affects everyone, whether they participate or not.
The implications of which are basically world changing. And it’s coming to an internet and law courts near you, quite soon.
It’s going to be a tsunami. A tsunami of completely faked porn videos. Possibly starring you. Or yer mum.
Err, Wot?
OK. Enough build up. WTF am I talking about?
So this story came up on Facebook last night, about the truth behind a Daisy Ridley ‘Sex Tape’. It’s fake. But the ‘new and noteworthy’ part of it is that it is a ‘real’ fake: somebody went to some trouble to superimpose Daisy’s face onto a porn clip.
Enough that people believed it. Which is basically the opposite reaction to most videos; people are more than willing to cry fake. To all intents and purpose, it’s a porn clip of Daisy Ridley. She’s just not in the clip.
Right now, that was probably a reasonably painstaking task, even for an enthusiastic amateur video editor. Enough of a task that not many people are going to take the time to do it. (Especially for free. If you can do that shit, you better be gettin’ paid.)
However, all of the technologies to pull this off in a mainstream consumer level video editing app already exist. It just hasn’t been done yet. But we’re probably only a generation or two of GPUs and CPUs and a generation or two of software refinement away from it. (Note, ‘a generation’, in computer terms, is like 6 months to 2 years. Same as your phone.)
Some Waffle
Fair warning: I’m gonna do a bit of boring and slightly techie waffle now by way of illustrating my point. Prepare for your eyes to glaze over. Or skip this bit; it’ll literally make no difference.
What you’re really looking at is a fairly innocuous app designed for ‘innocent fun’ along the lines of what Snapchat filters (or those annoying Animoji things) can do for you now – they can track your face and features and even make the superimposed face do expressions etc. FaceRig pulls this off to near perfection under ideal conditions, and you can make your own avatars with your own textures that mimic every move you make. You can even add props and clothes etc. And (at least, on the PC version) you can replace any video feed with your FaceRig feed so you ‘become’ a dapper red fox in a top hat and tails in your video chat or live streaming or podcast or whatever in any app.
The leap is being able to map this to full motion video, taking things like perspective and distance and movement into account. But it’s not that much of a leap. Imagine! You’ll be able to put daddies face on little Freddy toddling down the garden! What a hoot!
There are video apps that can do real time motion tracking in 3d space right now. Even on phones. There are plenty of Makeup apps and touch up apps like Portrait Pro and Portrait Body that can detect people and their features automatically in a picture (and therefore not much of a leap to frames of a video). You can mask off hair with ease to protect bangs – or entirely change the hair and makeup – and blend with the face by just painting roughly over the areas.
There are dedicated video apps such as HitFilm that allow you extremely sophisticated and fine grained abilities to add objects and particle effects to video footage in post production and yet can automatically track the objects movements in 3d space. Change the colour of a car. Add a lightsabre to a persons hand. Just a few clicks if you know what you’re doing and maybe some corrective key frame adjustments to the accuracy of the automatic tweening.
There are apps that can place modelled 3d objects in a scene and match focal distance and camera lens settings. Portrait Pro and Landscape Pro can even move the lighting position and colours in a photo with surprising effectiveness, even readjusting shadows and reflections. So again, rendering frames of a video, not such a big deal.
Video game cutscenes are getting so realistic these days, you can be forgiven for thinking it’s live action. (It’s always the lipsync that lets them down in my opinion). Lots of the animation looks so good because it’s motion captured from live actors. Note how they’re getting way more arty in their ‘camera work’ now they can easily apply after effects such as camera shake – or indeed stabilisation – and change focus and apply lens effects on the fly.
Back In The Room?
So. The point, then. Putting all that existing software tech together, you can track and recognise people and facial features, per frame of video, and rerender and tweak any elements of the scene, superimpose a new face over the original pretty much with the ease you can faceswap in snapchat today; ‘put that face there’. Done. Then wait a few hours for it to render, automatically matching facial movements frame for frame, mimicking the focus, lighting, colours etc from the scene. Then share! Share everywhere!
Except it’s not going to be about putting daddies face on little Freddy toddling down the garden, is it?
What’s the first thing anyone is gonna do with it?
Porn.
Yes, I Said Porn.
But this is not just regular Porn. This is Celebrity Porn! You Fucking Your Favourite Celebrity Porn! Your Teacher Fucking Some Contraption In A Dungeon. You Fucking That Girl That Said No! Revenge Porn That Never Happened! Screeeeeeeech. Wait, what?
It’s going to be a tsunami. A tsunami of completely faked porn videos. Possibly starring you. Or yer mum.
Sooooo, how does the law stand on that? You publish a porn video to every free porn site on the planet of the ex girlfriend… only thing is… it’s entirely faked. I mean, it IS a porn clip. It’s just that it didn’t actually star who is, um, starring in the video. Is it still revenge porn if it never happened? I sort of doubt it. I think new laws will be needed. New resource will be needed. But good luck whoever is going to take that one on and try and even define it in law, let alone even try and enforce it.
At that point, if it’s ‘good enough’ – and people are willing to put up with some pretty fucking poor quality porn – people won’t care that it’s fake. And nor will your friends when you’re trying to convince them that it never happened when they’ve got the evidence right in front of them.
And you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Discuss?
Also, somebody pleeeeeease post this to MumsNet? Because somebody has to think of the children. YEAH I WENT THERE. I SAID CHILDREN. AND PORN.
P.S Oh yeah. In a similar vein, people are going to be able to buy custom sex dolls with yer mums face on, too. But that’s probably another discussion for another day.
P.P.S. first person to write the described software is an instant multi millionaire. You’re welcome. I have plenty of input and experience, but I really can’t be arsed. Even with the promise of unlimited personalised porn or the lure of architecting the worlds descent into anarchy. You can pay me to consult, though. Or don’t, and I’ll see you when I sue you, which frankly requires far less effort from me with far higher potential reward.
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