Comment by wakahiu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wakahiu | Hacker News Reader

I was recently looking for designers for my company when I came across an interesting profile on Dribbble. I reached out and quickly scheduled a time when we could talk over zoom. At the meeting time, in comes this person who seems to have a strange-looking, silicone-like face. I was using my Zoom account (I rarely use other peoples zooms unless I trust them), to avoid situations like this. One thing I noticed is that when the candidate touched their face, their fingers would appear to sink into their skin - almost as if it were made of liquid. Secondly, their face appeared larger, lighter and smoother than their neck. I got spooked an immediately let the candidate know that I was not comfortable moving forward.

More interestingly, what exactly are them mechanics of getting a deep fake into video call? How is it possible that a what seems like a deepfake could make its way into my Zoom? Is Zoom enabling external plugins that alter video details?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hf9c9kg52nxal0/Screen%20Shot%2020...

You can just make Zoom use any webcam on your system

And you can write your own webcam drivers to use in any program

Or use existing software with virtual webcam output like OBS or ManyCam and write a plug-in for that

Our emit a network video stream and just play your video in that kind of software instead of writing a plugin

For what it's worth, it looks more like an aggressive filter rather than a deepfake.

My thoughts too - but giving benefit of doubt to gp since it’s a still shot vs video

Of course - just my opinion. To me, it looks like the combination of low quality webcam + aggressive skin smoothening "beauty" filter.

It’s fairly trivial to have a virtual camera source and point Zoom to that as it’s input. It has nothing to do with integrating deeply with Zoom or getting “into” your Zoom. Check out Snap Camera[0] for an example.

[0] https://snapcamera.snapchat.com/

I do very much hope that you told the candidate what spooked you. Ideally, you would have done this early in the interview, giving them a chance to disable any video filtering / face-beautifying software that they may have been running.

If you didn't do either one of those, perhaps you now know enough so that next time you will be able to give the interviewee a chance to demonstrate whether or not they're using a "Smooth over my facial blemishes because I'm uncomfortable with how my face looks and want it to look 'prettier'." filter.

Best of luck with your interviews!

The live-streaming software OBS has a “virtual webcam” feature that can make a generated video feed behave like a hardware webcam. Perhaps something similar is being used to feed generated video into zoom?

Input for software can be anything. Camera feed can be a generated one and the software consuming it doesn't have to be aware it isn't a real physical camera.

Zoom isn't aware.

Out of curiosity was that person asian?

Maybe they were just using some of those beautifying filters like chinese streamers do.

Zoom has a beautifying filter built into it.

Admittedly, I use it, but I have it set pretty low. My face isn't lit up very well, and without it, in my webcam, my skin ends up looking a lot rougher than it really is.

If I set it to the max, then it just looks like a blurry mess.

Things like OBS (streaming software) can create a virtual camera. I am guessing its something like that where Zoom does not even know the camera is not actually real hardware.

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