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Comment by thathndude | Hacker News Reader

I mean. No.

I understand the point of the article is “look how much I did with so little.” And it’s really good in terms of how much was done.

But the final deliverable isn’t at all convincing. Clickbait title.

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Made by a dude who has next to no experience in the field. Now imagine what a guy who knows what he's doing can do with a bit more money. That's what the allusion here is; the fact that a Reporter with 500$ even comes close should be an alarm signal to you.

You're exactly right. Look at the work of someone who does a lot of these and it's pretty damn impressive. I like Ctrl+Alt+Face on YouTube.

ex - Bill Hader/Tom Cruise - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrhRBb-1Ig

I think one thing that could have helped the reporter is if they had reencoded the original Zuckerberg footage into something with a lower bitrate. The fine details/imperfections on his forehead contrasted with the lower fidelity of data's face provides a little too much contrast. It doesn't help that most of the source data for Data's face is lower quality, plus he has so much makeup pancaked on his face. I think if those factors were accounted for, the reporter's results would have been much more convincing even though he's a deepfake neophyte.

Oh man; I’ve watched a bunch of Ctrl+Alt+Face videos, but I’d never seen that Tom Cruise one. Thanks — hilarious. Also, I love how they fade in Seth Rogan for, like, two seconds — especially considering the effort required to put together the training data, run the app, etc.

I'm under the impression that these things are easier to come infinitesimally close to, but very hard to get right: i.e. the old uncanny valley problem. A reporter with $500 can get very close, but a team of PhD with thousands of dollars and a lot of time may never be able to produce something that'll convince the public.

I'm NOT claiming that this is the case, I'm just saying we don't have a reason to believe why this can't be the case.

I'd really hesitate to bet on never in this case--even if never were scoped to mean not within 20 years.

There really are two separate questions though:

- Can experts with a big budget create videos that even equally expert analysis can't tell from the real thing? (Maybe yes, maybe no. But it's hard.

- With modest skill and budget, are people increasingly able to create fake videos that stand up a cursory glance and can fool people as a result? (Absolutely--or at least we're getting close.)

My point is, there is no close or far in this business. It's binary, either it looks real, or it doesn't. If your intention is to make deepfake to put it in a movie, video game or any other entertainment system, then sure you're right.

But that already exists, DeepFake isn't a fundamental development for that. What is the "big thing" about deepfake is that we can imitate speeches of people in leadership positions. For this, we can get really really close; but it's unclear if it'll ever be realistic enough to be a problem in court cases, politics etc...

This is also an impressive DeepFake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm3squcz7Aw

Voice actor reads a poem in voices of famous people; his face gets swapped with the actor's face; the combination of voice and face makes it very believable.

This one is fantastic. It seems like just the most characteristic traits are carried over and the result is seem less.

Yes. The cost alone could have been significantly reduced. As the article notes, using an owned GPU locally instead of renting one for a cloud instance would have reduced the cost. The author also overspent on virtual CPU resources - paying for unused RAM and CPU cores when most of the processing was done on GPUs. And once you have a good model trained, actually putting it to use in inference is much faster and cheaper.

Man, you're reading way too much into my headline. The headline describes the article accurately: I created a deepfake. It took me two weeks and I spent $552. The headline doesn't say anything about whether it was convincing or not.

> The headline doesn't say anything about whether it was convincing or not.

I guess I always assumed the 'deep' in deepfake meant it was convincing, but upon further consideration it's probably just a nod to DNNs. Well played sir.

I didn't even realise it was Data until reading the article. I just thought Mark's eyes were looking a little weird.

Like he forgot to use his ocular oil drops.

I was thinking the same. It looks like one of those bad lip reading episodes on youtube, with the additional element of bad CGI.

I totally agree. After watching only a second of the video I am convinced that this is not Mark Zuckerberg and that this video has been faked.

It's not meant to be Mark Zuckerberg, it's meant to be Data from Star Trek superimposed onto his face.

How to create news when there is no news: try to write a tutorial about it, fail, then state that thing-that-people-irrationally-fear-because-nipples is not something to fear yet, because even seasoned tech & blockchain journalists can't do it.

The absolute autofellatio state of hype media these days. Ha-ha, look at how this autistic CEO looks like a robot, and shame on you for imagining what Charlize Theron looks like naked. Tune in next week where I try and fail to launch an ERC-token, and use that experience to argue that cryptocurrency adoption will be delayed.

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