Deepfakes ...

What is a Video? details the inevitability of AI driven digital video, complete with synthetic actors, scripts and CG so good, one will not be able to discern the difference from the real thing. While this inevitability remains a few years off, current tech, developed by the Adobes of the world, is now being used to generate deepfakes whereby a person's face is mapped onto another's, something most disconcerting as to how this new "reality" pertains to truth as man moves further into the 21st century.

FOR TAYLOR KLEIN, it starts with a weird Facebook message from a friend. A Pornhub link. She doesn’t open it. Must be spam, she figures. “I think you’ve been hacked?” she replies. Nope. Her pal insists the link is real. She clicks, and her nightmare begins.

This rise in deepfake porn is made possible by a new wave of AI editing tools available online—tools that Compton and Hamlyn incorporate into their documentary. We won't reveal how here, but suffice it to say: Another Body does an excellent job of underlining how deepfake technology can distort our perceptions of each other. The point is to put a human face on something many try to dismiss as not “real.”

Various images of face CGI illustrious: Guardian Design/AFB/Washington Post via Getty Images

How it's done ...

It takes a few steps to make a face-swap video. First, you run thousands of face shots of the two people through an AI algorithm called an encoder. The encoder finds and learns similarities between the two faces, and reduces them to their shared common features, compressing the images in the process. A second AI algorithm called a decoder is then taught to recover the faces from the compressed images. Because the faces are different, you train one decoder to recover the first person’s face, and another decoder to recover the second person’s face. To perform the face swap, you simply feed encoded images into the “wrong” decoder. For example, a compressed image of person A’s face is fed into the decoder trained on person B. The decoder then reconstructs the face of person B with the expressions and orientation of face A. For a convincing video, this has to be done on every frame.

Out of control says it all as truth begins to go away in realtime.