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Fun with Snapchat's Gender Swapping Filter
- joshypants 7y agoYou can follow artists like Mario Klingemann to see people experimenting on the cutting edge of this stuff: https://twitter.com/quasimondo/status/1127906469108756480 https://twitter.com/quasimondo/status/1127906469108756480
- Raphmedia 7y ago> I have a friend who does drag. It's a lot of work! I'm excited for technology like this, because it will make it easier for makeup & drag artists to experiment with new ideas and identities cheaply and quickly. Similarly, I'm transgender and use those applications to come up with new ideas on how to make little changes to my appearance to feminize my features. Sometimes coming up with makeup ideas is hard since I lack in experience and equipment. I don't want to purchase a bunch products I'll end up never using. Technologies like this allows me to quickly test makeup ideas. For example, I have green eyes so they automatically add purple eye-shadow to make my eyes look brighter. I've since incorporated this color in my daily makeup. I've noticed that they overdraw the lipstick to make the lips look fuller, so I also do that when I want a more polished look. However, this is a double edged sword. Those filters raise expectation on what you might look like after a gender transition. I've seen a lot of angry and disappointed people because of that. Those applications change a lot about your face, sometimes in subtle ways you won't notice. The curve of the jaw is slightly different, the eyes are a bit farther apart, your skull is more round, etc. Changes that are pretty much impossible even with facial feminization surgeries. People strive to reach that "perfection" and end up being stuck in limbo, unable to reach it so unable to free themselves from their gender dysphoria. It's easy to spiral down from there.
- Hendrikto 7y ago> I've noticed that they overdraw the lipstick to make the lips look fuller, so I also do that when I want a more polished look. Does that not look obvious from close up?
- Raphmedia 7y agoNot if done correctly. This is simply one of the methods of applying lipstick. See: https://imgur.com/a/f8GE3iE https://imgur.com/a/f8GE3iE This also serve as an example of what I was saying above. I would have never thought to learn that skill if not for those apps that applied it to me. It's like having your own personal AI makeup assistant.
- daenz 7y ago>Similarly, I'm transgender and use those applications to come up with new ideas on how to make little changes to my appearance to feminize my features. Do you ever feel like these applications are re-enforcing physical gender stereotypes? Like "you selected female, here is what females should look like." If gender is a social construct, tech like this is clearly maintaining that construct, yet nobody seems to have a problem with it.
- simonh 7y agoGender could be a benign or even beneficial social construct, if that’s what it is, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing.
- CuriouslyC 7y agoHow would a lack of choice and the ability to self determine be positive?
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y agoYou can't pick your ethinicity either, it just exists.
- jdashg 7y agoPeople would change it if they could, same as height and any number of other immutables that people are discriminated on.
- CydeWeys 7y agoPeople are already getting leg surgeries to adjust height. It doesn't seem worth it to me, and there's lots of potential negative side effects, but this is something that is actually happening. And I don't even need to explain all the surgeries people do to add or remove fatness.
- matz1 7y ago
- zamalek 7y agoIsn't there also good to be had here, because it could normalize the concept of transgenderism, drag, etc.?
- Raphmedia 7y agoI've met quite a few people who told me that they questioned their gender identity after playing with such a filter. That's a good thing, it allows people with an otherwise strong sense of their own gender identity to have a small glimpse into what a gender identity disorder could be like. For a cis person, this happens when an AI morph their features into the opposite gender. For a person with a gender identity disorder, this happen with regular mirrors. It's two very different experience, but the sour taste in your mouth is similar. It is easier to have empathy for something you have experienced the tip of. Similar to how someone with a broken heart will be able to empathize with the struggles of someone with clinical depression.
- peteretep 7y ago> I'm transgender and use those applications to come up with new ideas on how to make little changes to my appearance to feminize my features I've been recommending FaceApp to people who want to buy new glasses or sunglasses for a while. It seems pretty stable.
- sirsuki 7y agoAre there other online Machine Learning apps out there for this? Or is Snap-Chat the only one? I remember back in the VRML/SecondLife heyday where you could pick an avatar that was another gender. I still do that. But the emphasis for voice chat in modern games and MMORPGs make it far more difficult. A low gruff voice does not bode well coming from a feminine avatar. Catches too many off guard.
- Raphmedia 7y ago> Are there other online Machine Learning apps out there for this? Faceapp comes to mind[1]. There's also Artistry Virtual Beauty[2] but it is a bit less advanced. I believe that Facebook Messenger also have some similar features. > A low gruff voice does not bode well coming from a feminine avatar. Catches too many off guard. A lot of sound cards those days come with tools that allow you to modify your audio input. Often, they'll have a female settings where it changes the pitch to make your voice sound more like a woman's. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.faceapp&hl=en_CA https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.faceapp&hl=... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.perfectcorp.amb&hl=en_CA https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.perfectcor...
- pavel_lishin 7y agoThere's software out there to dynamically change your voice on the fly.
- mcintyre1994 7y agoSnapchat have filters that do that too.
- whuffman 7y agoMy company, Modulate, is building "voice skins" for exactly this purpose: customizing your voice in chat for online videogames! It's a really interesting technical challenge. On the one hand, changing your timbre to another human voice is much more complicated than basic pitch shifting, so we ended up using deep neural networks for a kind of simultaneous speech-recognition and speech-synthesis approach (though training this system to preserve e.g. the emotional complexity of your input speech while still changing out the timbre convincingly is difficult - we use adversarial training on the raw audio waveform, which is powerful but also pretty much unknown territory compared to images). On the other hand, it's important to run with very low latency on your device while you're playing, which means that we can't simply "throw the biggest network we can" at the problem. So we have a tradeoff between model latency, which is easy to characterize, and audio quality / voice skin plausibility, which is pretty ambiguous and subjective. Finally, as this kind of tech improves the potential for misuse becomes an important problem, so we need to build in protections (like watermarking the audio) that can help prevent fraud while not compromising the speed of the algorithm or the quality of the output audio.
- ve55 7y agoI appreciate seeing posts like this as someone who doesn't use any of these apps themselves. It's intriguing what we're already able to accomplish in this area with sufficient funding and data, it makes the future seem very interesting.
- giggles_giggles 7y agoPhysical gender stereotypes? The differences in physical appearance, like the shape of the bones in your face and the fact some people have penises and other people have vaginas, caused by activation of the SRY gene (the sex determinism gene), are not social constructs.
- daenz 7y agoPhysical gender stereotypes are things like hair length/style, whether makeup is applied, eyebrow grooming etc--all things that these apps are doing. These are not determined by sex. They are physical gender stereotypes, and are social constructs. Apps like these are upholding those stereotypes. I'll put it another way. If apps like these were framed with a right-wing narrative of "this is what men should look like" and "this is what women should look like," people would be furious. But that's exactly what these apps are implying right now yet I don't see anyone speaking out against them.
- temp1831 7y agoThe shape of the jawline differing between men and women is not a stereotype.
- tobr 7y agoThe makeup and haircut applied by the filter are social constructs, though.
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- s_kilk 7y agoSex != Gender
- Ronnie_Dipple 7y agoMy wife is openly bi so won't mind me saying this, she gender swapped me and apparently I would make a super hot chick. It's nice to know she finds me attractive as any gender.
- wtdata 7y agoIt's fantastic to see how far this tech came in such a short time. It's also scary, because soon it will be very dificult to trust anything you see in video. What now demands a big CGI budget, will be possible to do with a simple App.
- kleer001 7y agoThere's still tells. 80% realism is still far enough away to be unrealistic. There's lots of places it breaks. I think soon is still at least 20 years away. And 20 years away in technology is basically never. Reality is very very detailed and we've been optimized in our evolution to get to that fine grit quickly. It doesn't entirely apply, but here's an article (one of many) on telling deep fakes: https://www.howtogeek.com/341469/how-to-spot-a-deep-fake-face-swapped-video/ https://www.howtogeek.com/341469/how-to-spot-a-deep-fake-fac... Also this short one on playing with a robo-call: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread988484/pg1 http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread988484/pg1
- chipperyman573 7y agoI would argue it's a good thing. This was already possible for people with a lot of money, but nobody knew about it because it was so rarely done. When anyone can do it, these fake videos will become common and people will realize you can't trust it just because it's in a video. The only drawback is that there will be an awkward period where smart people can do it but most people can't, so nobody realizes what's going on.
- Insanity 7y agoThat is just crazy impressive to me. I'm not a fan of those kind of apps myself but it's pretty cool what they're engineers get to spend time on.
- throw03172019 7y agoDid the post get deleted? Getting a 404.
- redfern314 7y agoLooks like it. https://web.archive.org/web/20190513170015/https://blog.evjang.com/2019/05/fun-with-snapchats-gender-swapping.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190513170015/https://blog.evja...
- xrd 7y agoI wonder if Snap offered him a job to take it down.
- cycrutchfield 7y agoIf anything, it is free advertising. Not sure why they would be bothered.
- dr_zoidberg 7y agoIt's a shame it got deleted. From the web archive, it looks like an interesting, in-depth exploration of the filter.
- mromanuk 7y agoit's down for me.
- ericjang 7y agoMy bad, I accidentally unpublished it with my butter fingers.
- taytus 7y agohttps://twitter.com/luckygoddessn7/status/1127320165379641344 https://twitter.com/luckygoddessn7/status/112732016537964134...
- the_watcher 7y agoI don't usually pay attention to things like this, but I have a younger sister who uses Snapchat. She used this filter and the output was essentially a perfect photo of our brother, but with longer hair. I couldn't help but be impressed.
- ljcn 7y agoWhat about the brother -> sister mapping?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- davemp 7y agoJudging from my family's group chat that also works really well.
- the_watcher 7y agoWasn't anywhere close.
- cat199 7y agoah the rules of gender stereotyping: virtuous when it's pro-trans, misogynistic otherwise, and of course, misandry doesn't exist.
- codedokode 7y agoWhat an awesome thing. This is probably a rare example of using technologies like machine learning and face recognition for good. Also, it means that we cannot trust photos anymore.
- politician 7y ago> What an awesome thing. This is probably a rare example of using technologies like machine learning and face recognition for good. Also, it means that we cannot trust photos anymore. You can't trust any social media anymore. Between Lyrebird, GPT-2, Deep Fakes, Sybil attacks on social media sites, and abusing Facebook/Google targeted advertising to leak targeting information on anyone, any sufficiently motivated individual, group or nation state has enough power to locate audiences and reorient them through tailor-made content to the attacker's objectives. Today's cat-picture-viewing joke-seeking social media user faces adversaries who can deploy coordinated attacks from multiple points-of-origin (via Sybil clones) using multiple mediums (via audio, video, text generation) against specific targets without collateral damage to non-targeted audiences (target discovery via surveillance platforms like Facebook, Google). The information weapons deployed can change minds, destroy relationships with family members, undermine friendships, cause confusion, addict, and waste time that could be spent organizing against the attacker's policies. In your profile, you state that you're a Russian developer. Consider that it's known that the Russian government interfered with American elections using these divide-and-conquer techniques. Consider that we have to question whether or not your profile is a Sybil account designed to slightly shift the perspective of HN readers towards the idea that Russians are not undermining elections by presenting the idea that educated Russians are naive to the threat. Likewise, consider that this response might be a cointel operation. One can _hope_ that you're genuine, but that's about it. Sadly, the untrustworthiness goes far beyond photos. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/05/13/deepfakes-why-your-instagram-photos-video-could-be-vulnerable/3344536002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/05/13/deepfakes-why...
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- stedaniels 7y agoMirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20190513170015/https://blog.evjang.com/2019/05/fun-with-snapchats-gender-swapping.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190513170015/https://blog.evja...
- aiCeivi9 7y agoI looks like what you could see in "A Scanner Darkly" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/
- Bobbleoxs 7y agoYou read my mind! I was just going to post this - So here's a real application than Snap and kiddie jokes (not saying they are not fun!) - a scramble suit to protect witness/whistle-blower identity
- korethr 7y agoFor shits and giggles, I installed Snapchat just to play with this, after seeing some friends having fun with it. For background, I am guy, but with long hair and a beard. I wouldn't look out of place in a mosh pit at a heavy metal show. I've also been told I look like Jesus. To my amusement, my beard and hair seem to break the female face filter. I take picture with it, and nothing changes. Conversely, if I use the male face filter there's quite a difference. My hair gets trimmed, my beard is darkened and my jawline made more square than it already was. The male filter still gets confused by my hair and fails to remove all of it much below my jawline; I can still see my natural hair transitioning back into existence about my neck and shoulders. This makes me think that the filters are mainly working on hair length, or perhaps me already having hair short-circuits the filter and it forgets to address my cheekbones, jawline, lips, nose and brow. Scratch all of that. It just worked properly. Compared to the male filter, it did soften my jawline, blur away my beard, and kept my natural lighter hair color (though it took away my natural curls). It could have stood to reduced the size of my nose. Still in the uncanny valley for me, but much closer to crossing that threshold in than some other filters I've seen in the past.
- ebg13 7y agoI'm guessing this filter is only available on certain phones? I installed Snapchat to play with it, but apparently I don't get access.
- chipperyman573 7y agoDid you find the filters? You have to hold down on your face when the selfie camera is activated. It's on my LG G7, which basically nobody uses, so I doubt they only targeted certain phones (unless they block generic criteria like less than 2 GB ram or something).
- jedberg 7y ago> Did you find the filters? You have to hold down on your face when the selfie camera is activated. This right here is why I hate Snapchat. I've never seen a more unintuitive UI.
- chipperyman573 7y agoSome people think it's a feature, not a bug: https://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/the-ingenious-reason-snapchat-makes-its-app-so-hard-to-use.html https://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/the-ingenious-reason-snapch...
- wishinghand 7y agoThere's theories out there that Snapchat's confounding UI is to make older people frustrated with it and avoid it, keeping it cool.
- StavrosK 7y agoI've found the filters, but I can't find one that does this.
- striking 7y agoYou may have to have someone send you a snap from their phone with the filter installed and hit the Unlock button in that snap. It's weird.
- wjn0 7y agoFrom a machine learning standpoint, I would guess that this is achieved with a partially supervised approach. The idea would be to embed an entire face dataset from a number of different poses to a latent space by some method (could be as simple as PCA, or as complex as an arbitrary neural network). An arbitrary classification method (using a partial labelling of faces by gender) yields a hyperplane which optimally separates the labelled points. Then, something like a simple reflection across this hyperplane yields another point in the latent space, and the generator yields a corresponding face of the opposite gender. Anyone know if this has been implemented for a task like this?