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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

We should stop calling it deep fake. And start calling it facial masking. And realize that this will now be kiddie tech in the future.

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Deep fake is a great term. Facial masking hides all the other uses of deep fakes. You can fake anything with these techniques based on deep learning.

The term is just spot on.

That's exactly why there should be a distinction made. The term is too broad for a specific subset of deep fake technology that has matured far beyond its fun monster phase.

Facemask and soundmask are good terms for a democratized warping of visual and audio data.

Those terms seem a little broad to me. If the news reported that Barack Obama's likeness was used in a "facemask", nobody would know what happened. If they said it was used for a "deepfake", most people still probably wouldn't know what happened, but at least they could look it up and get a general idea.

Considering how facemasking and soundmasking have multiple contextual meanings, I think deepfake is the perfect word. If you need more precision, then you can use the phrase "visual deepfake" or "audio deepfake".

I agree with this mostly in the sense that we need a specific word without any other context that defines what these are. I'm not sure that "deepfake" is that word but it definitely fits the bill based on what we're looking for. Deepfake has the advantage of being a word that's already in common usage that a good number of people recognize as "Oh, that's a fake done by a computer" so adding "audio" or "video" in front of it also fits the requirement of being easy to distinguish without being cluttered by other meanings or contexts. While we may be able to come up with a better word (in the same sense that a "tweet" is now unambiguous in context), I think it would be a misstep not to take the snowball that is "deepfake" and continue to use it in this context especially as a means to educate people on fake, computer-generated audio and video. People can barely keep up with tech buzzwords as it is so the fact that "deepfake" is already something in the public consciousness means a lot.

Deep Fake tech needs to puncture the public's consciousness ASAP, diluting terms will be counterproductive

Wouldn't that be a voicemask?

Within VFX the terms are actor, object and background replacement. Rarely mentioned in any of the deep fake literature is the requirement for a non-facial skin skin tone correction for most deep fakes to begin to look natural. Everybody ignores the fact that you nor I have the same skin tone, and that needs to be touched up for any face replacement to start to look correct.

A good VFX artist can also do a hell of a better job than any of these deepfake automated platforms. And has been able to do that for a long, long time now. So while deepfakes becoming more available to everyone worries me the fact that we have not yet seen tons of well done face swap videos done by malicious actors paying a decent VFX artist makes me wonder how big this will really become.

That being said for smaller countries with less internet access (and less education) this has already become a big problem (lots of cases in elections in Africa) so I think once again it comes down to education: we must inoculate people to bullshit like this by giving them the tools to spot it and future things like it.

Yep, I was an actor replacement specialist at Rhythm & Hues for several years.

Hopefully you didnt have to be involved in that very fun massive lawsuit

The "Deepfake Puppetry" term used in the article seemed to me like an improved term, an excellent and accurate description. It is using deepfake technology, and the "puppetry" term both describes accurately what it is doing — animating a target image like a puppet — and includes a vivid description to the nontechnical audience.

"Facial Masking" is not bad either, quite accurate, but I'm not sure it provides as broad a description than "Deepfake Puppetry".

Either way, it is important to get a term that is both accurate and resonating with the audience to ensure that the general public understands the serious potential damage for this technology (as with any powerful tool, can be used for good or evil).

Puppetry is a better term!

It not only captures the face but also the body, and maybe the voice. Facial masking is more programmer friendly.

It's already kiddie tech. Just google deepfake maker and you get dozens of hits for free services to make passable fakes.

It only works if the background is continuous and fairly static - you can't easily synthesize a complex background if you have no reference material. You can of course extrapolate the visible background using other AI that has knowledge of real surfaces; however if the background has familiar content (like a sign) that is not visible in the reference frame(s), it's unlikely to fool anyone no matter how well the face is animated.

> it's unlikely to fool anyone no matter how well the face is animated

Call me a cynic, but I believe humans, myself included, are easy to fool. If the face looks good enough, plenty of people will fail to spot the Invisible Gorilla.

It must be trivial to use one of these approaches to generate a removable background and render the background with something else, like a static image, video, or 3d software

> And realize that this will now be kiddie tech in the future.

Oh, absolutely. And we're not talking decades here. This tech will likely be ready to rock within a few election cycles

I think with enough money / professionalism it's ready to rock already; a lot of the deepfakes I've seen so far have been done by "amateurs" (that is, individuals, not big companies). The last big companies' work has been the star wars prequels that used CGI, which was still in the uncanny valley imo.

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