13 ms·

VASA-1: Lifelike audio-driven talking faces generated in real time

341 points by vyrotek 3y ago

bradley13 2y ago
Wow. Just...wow. I watched one of the videos very carefully. Absolutely natural movements of eyes, eyebrows, lips, even the hair resting on the woman's shoulders. The text even contained a double entendre, and the facial expression was exactly right. Of course, I'm sure that whoever put these demos together also invested time in getting them right. Still: so would anyone seeking to put words in another person's mouth. Imagine your favorite (or least favorite) politician coming out with a speech promoting something awful. Even if the video were immediately debunked, people would remember it. And many people would never believe the debunking. This is the world we now live in: you literally cannot trust anything you see online.
bradley13 2y ago
I see lots of comments wondering what the use-cases for this technology are. It is scary, and it can and will be abused. However, there are a lot of genuine applications. We may or may not like these applications, but they are going to happen. Here are a few, just off the top of my head: - Advertising. Where I am, there is a pervasive commercial with (very realistic) talking goats. Why not do the same thing with people? No need for actors, when you can just tell the computer what you want. - Cinema and television. Especially for bit parts and extras, just create the characters, instead of rounding up a bunch of extras. - Video games and alternate realities. They've been getting more and more realistic - this is just the next step. - Pornography. Again, why trouble yourself with real actors? Sell premium videos customized to each customer. - Politics. Give "live" speeches in different venues, without all the bother of travelling. It's a very small step to answering questions live - just train up an LLM with the responses you want it to give. Lots more applications as well - those are just a few that come to mind.
nowhereai 3y ago
woah. so far not in the news. this is the only article https://www.ai-gen.blog/2024/04/microsoft-vasa-1-ai-technology.html https://www.ai-gen.blog/2024/04/microsoft-vasa-1-ai-technolo...
acidburnNSA 3y ago
Oh no. "Cameras on please!" will be replaced by "AI generated faces off please!" in teams.
- darig 3y ago
  [dead]
mdrzn 3y ago
Holy shit these are really high quality and basically in realtime on a 4090. What a time to be alive.
- rbinv 3y ago
  It really is something. 40 FPS on a 4090, damn.
nojvek 3y ago
I like the considerations topic. There’s likely also a an unsaid statement. This is for us only and we’ll be the only ones making money from it with our definition of “safety” and “positive”.
gavi 3y ago
The GPU requirements for realtime video generation are very minimal in the grand scheme of things. Assault on reality itself.
nycdatasci 3y ago
“We have no plans to release an online demo, API, product, additional implementation details, or any related offerings until we are certain that the technology will be used responsibly and in accordance with proper regulations.”
- feyman_r 3y ago
  /s it doesn’t have the phrase LLM in the title
- justinclift 3y ago
  > until we are certain that the technology will be used responsibly ... That's basically "never" then, so we'll see how long they hold out. Scammers are already using the existing voice/image/video generation apparently fairly successfully. :(
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    Eventually someone will implement one of these really good recent ones as open source and then it will be on replicate etc. right now the open source ones like SadTalker and Video Retalking are not live and are unconvincing.
  - spacemanspiff01 3y ago
    Having a delay, where people can see what's coming down the pipe, does have value. In a year there may/will be a open source model. But knowing that this is possible is important to know. I'm fairly clued in, and am constantly surprised at how fast things are changing.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      > But knowing that this is possible ... Who knowing this is possible? The general elderly person isn't going to know any time soon. The SV IT people probably will. It's not an even distribution of knowledge. ;/
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
qwertox 3y ago
So an ugly person will be able to present his or her ideas on the same visual level as a beautiful person. Is this some sort of democratization?
fullstackchris 3y ago
lol how does something like this get only 50ish votes but some hallucinating video slop generator from some of the other competitors gets thousands?
fluffet 3y ago
This is absolutely crazy. And it'll only get better from here. Imagine "VASA-9" or whatever. I thought deepfakes were still quite a bit away but after this I will have to be way more careful online. It's not far from behind something that can show up in your "YouTube shorts" feed and trick you if you didn't already know it was AI.
- smusamashah 3y ago
  This is good but nowhere as good as EMO https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/ https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533326) This one has too much movement and looks eerie/robotic/uncanny valley. While EMO looks just perfect.
  - vessenes 3y ago
    Hard disagree -- I think you might be misremembering how EMO looks in practice -- I'm sure we'll learn VASA-1 "telltales" but to my eyes there are far fewer than EMO - zero of the EMO videos were 'perfect' for me, and many show little glitches or missing sync. VASA-1 still blinks a bit more than I think is natural, but it looks much more fluid. Both are, BTW, AMAZING!! Pretty crazy.
    - smusamashah 3y ago
      In VASA there is way to much body movement instead of just being he head as if camera is moving in the strong winds. EMO is a lot more human like. In the very first video on the EMO page I still cannot see it as a generated video, its that real. The lip movement, the expressions are in almost in perfect sync with the voice. That is absolutely not the case with VASA
gedy 3y ago
My first thought was "oh no the interview fakes", but then I realized - what if they just kept using the face? Would I care?
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Yeah, even if they just use LLMs to do all the work, or are a LLM themselves, as long as they can do the work I guess. Weird implications for various regulations though.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  It would be interesting that a remote candidate could easily identify as whatever ethnicity, age or even gender they consider most beneficial for hiring to avoid discrimination or fit certain diversity incentives. Tech like this has the potential to bring us back to the days of "on the Internet, nobody know's you're a dog" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
pxoe 3y ago
maybe making a webpage with 27 videos isn't the greatest web design idea
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  the busted two scrolling sections on mobile really doesnt help
- zamadatix 2y ago
  It's up to your browser on whether those are actually loaded all at once. E.g. on Chrome Desktop with no data saver modes enabled it buffers the first couple seconds of each video then when you play it grabs the remaining MBs for that. That way you can see the videos as quick as you like but not actually have to load all 27 fully just because you opened the page.
IshKebab 3y ago
Oh god don't watch their teeth! Proper creepy. Still, apart from the teeth this looks extremely convincing!
- ygjb 3y ago
  yeah, teeth, tongue movement and lack of tongue shape and the "stretching" of the skin around the cheeks in the images pushed the videos right into the uncanny valley for me.
- mtremsal 3y ago
  The teeth resizing dynamically is incredibly distracting, or more positively, a nice way to identify fakes. For now.
ilaksh 3y ago
The paper mentions it uses Diffusion Transformers. The open source implementation that comes up in Google is Facebook Research's PyTorch implementation which is a non-commercial license. https://github.com/facebookresearch/DiT https://github.com/facebookresearch/DiT Is there something equivalent but MIT or Apache? I feel like diffusion transformers are key now. I wonder if OpenAI implemented their SORA stuff from scratch or if they built on the Facebook Research diffusion transformers library. That would be interesting if they violated the non-commercial part. Hm. Found one: https://github.com/milmor/diffusion-transformer-keras https://github.com/milmor/diffusion-transformer-keras
jazzyjackson 3y ago
i get why this is interesting but why is it desirable? real jurassic park "too preoccupied with whether they could" vibes
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Now I can join the meeting "in a suit" while being out paddleboarding!
m3kw9 3y ago
If you see talking heads with static/simple/blurred backgrounds from now on, assume it is fake. In the near future they will accompany realistic backgrounds and even less detectable fakes, we will have to assume all vids could be faked.
- Retric 3y ago
  I still find the faces themselves to be really obviously wrong. The sound is just off, close enough to tell who is being imitated but not particularly good.
  - tredre3 3y ago
    Especially the hair "physics" and sometimes the teeth shift around a bit. But that's nitpicking. It's good enough to fool someone not watching too closely. And the fact that the result is this good with a single photo is truly astonishing, we used to have to train models on thousands of photos for days only to end up with a worse result!
  - tyingq 3y ago
    It's interesting to me that some of the long-standing things are still there. For example, lots of people with an earring in only one ear, unlikely asymmetry in the shape or size of their ears, etc.
- hypeatei 3y ago
  I wonder how video evidence in court is going to be affected by this. Both from a defense and prosecution perspective. Technically videos could've been faked before but it would require a ton of effort and skill that no average person would have.
  - greenavocado 3y ago
    There will be a new cottage industry of AI detectives that serve as expert witnesses and they will attest to the originality of media to the court
  - 3y ago
metalspoon 3y ago
AI can talk with me. Why need a friend in real life?
alfalfasprout 3y ago
What this is starting to reveal is that there's a clear need for some kind of chain of custody system that guarantees the authenticity of what we see. Nikon/Canon tried doing this in the past, but improper storage of private keys lead to vulnerabilities. As far as I'm aware it's never extended to video either. With modern secure hardware keys it may yet be possible. The difficulty is that any kind of photo/video manipulation would break the signature (and there are practical reasons to want to be able to edit videos obviously). In the ideal world, any mutation to the original source content could be traceable to the original source content. But that's not an easy problem to solve.
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  No, we are merely returning to the pre-photography state of things where a mere printed image is not sufficient evidence for anything.
  - tass 3y ago
    There goes the dashcam industry…
    - barbazoo 3y ago
      You're being downvoted but I think the comment raises a good question. what will happen when someone gets accused of doctoring their dashcam footage? Or any footage used for evidence.
      - tass 2y ago
        I wasn’t really kidding with my comment. I just recently used camera footage as part of an accident claim and the assessor immediately said “that wasn’t your fault, we take responsibility on behalf of the driver”. In a few years time when (if) faking realistic footage becomes trivial, I suspect this kind of video will have a much, much higher level of scrutiny or only be accepted from certain sources such as government owned traffic cameras.
  - 3y ago
TriangleEdge 3y ago
Why is this research being done? Is this some kind of arms race? The only purpose of this technology I can think of is getting spies to abuse others. Am I going to have to do AuthN and AuthZ on every phone call and zoom now?
- Arnavion 3y ago
  On the other hand, if deepfaking becomes common enough that everyone stops trusting everything they read / see on the internet, it would be a net good against the spread of disinformation compared to today.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    I don't see that as an outcome. We have already seen a grand erosion of trust in institutions. Moving to an even lower trust society does not sound like it would have positive consequences for discourse, public policy, or society at large.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Ironically low effort deep fakes might increase trust in organizations that have had the budget to fake stuff since their inception. The losers are 'citizen journalist' broadcasting on Youtube etc.
    - throwthrowuknow 3y ago
      The benefit is that you can only trust in person interaction with social and governmental institutions so people will have to leave their damn house again and go talk to each other face to face. Too many of our current problems are caused by people only interacting with each other and the world through third parties who are performing a MITM operation for their own benefit.
      - 1attice 3y ago
        This assumes that it's a two-way door. Over the past century and a half, we've moved into vast, anonymous spaces, where I'm as likely to know and get along with my neighbour as I am to win the lottery. And this is important. No, it's not just a matter of putting on an effort to learn who my neighbour is -- my neighbour is literally someone whose life experiences are wildly different, whose social outcomes will be wildly different, whose beliefs and values are wildly different, and, for all I know, goes to conferences about how to eliminate me and my kind. (This last part is not speculation; I'm trans; see: CPAC) And these are my reasons. My neighbour is probably equivalently terrified of me, or what I represent, or the media I consume, or the conferences that I go to. Generalizing, you can't take a bunch of random people whose only bond is that they share meatspace-proximity, draw a circle around them, and declare them a community; those communities are _gone_, and you can no more bring them back than you can revive a corpse. (This would also probably not be a good idea, even if it were possible: they were also incredibly uncomfortable places for anyone who didn't fit in, and we have generations of fiction about people risking everything to leave for those big anonymous cities we created in step 1.) So, here we are, dependent on technology to stay in touch with far-flung friends and lovers and family, all of us, scattered like spiderwebs across the globe, and now into the strands drips a poison. Daniel Dennett was right. Counterfeit people are an enormous danger to civilization. Research like this should stop immediately.
balls187 3y ago
I'm curious what is the reason for deepfake research and what the practical application is. Can someone explain the commercial need to take someones likeness and generate video content? If I was an a-list celebrity, I would give permission for coke to make a commercial with my likeness, provided I am allowed final approval of the finished ad? Do I have an avatar that attends my zoom work calls?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hypeatei 3y ago
  Entertainment maybe? I know that's not necessarily an ethical reason but some have made hilarious AI-generated songs already.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  The purpose is to give remote workers the ability to clone themselves and automate their many jobs. /s (but actually, because laziness is the driver of all innovation, I wouldn't be surprised if this happens).
- JamesBarney 3y ago
  Video games, entertainment, and avatars seems like the big ones.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    If that is really the reason then this is insane and everyone involved should put their keyboards down and stop what they are doing. This would be as if we invented and sold nuclear weapons to dig out quarry mines faster. The inconvenience it saves us quickly disappears into the overwhelming shadow of the enormous harm now enabled.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      > This would be as if we invented and sold nuclear weapons to dig out quarry mines faster. ”Project Plowshare was the overall United States program for the development of techniques to use nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes.”[0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
physhster 3y ago
A fantastic technological advance for election interference!
- RGamma 3y ago
  Such an exciting startup idea! I'm thrilled!
- IshKebab 3y ago
  As if this technology was needed.
karaterobot 3y ago
We need some clear legislation around this right now.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  counterpoint: we don't need any more legislation
  - qwertox 3y ago
    I tend towards agreeing with you. Many of the problems, like impersonation, are already illegal. And replacing a person which spreads lies, as can be seen in most TV or glossy cover ads, shouldn't trigger some new legal action. The only difference is that now the actor is also a lie. And countries which use actors or news anchors for spreading propaganda surely won't see an issue with replacing them with AI characters. People who then get to read that their most favorite, stunningly beautiful Instagram or TikTok influencer is nothing but a fat, chips-eating ugly person using AI, may try to raise some legal issues to soothe their disappointment. They then might raise a point which sounds reasonable, but which would then force politicians to also tackle the lies which are spread in TV/Magazines ads. Maybe clearly labeling any use of this tech, maybe even with a QR code linking to who is the owner of the AI, similar to QR codes on meat packaging which allow you to track the origin of the meat, would be something what laws could be helpful with, in the spirit of transparency.
- 4ndrewl 3y ago
  In which jurisdiction?
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    What jurisdiction would not benefit from legislation around duplicating people's identities using AI?
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Legislation only impairs the good guys.
binkHN 3y ago
Full details at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/
FredPret 3y ago
Anyone have any good ideas for how we're going to do politics now? Today a big ML model can do this and it's somewhat regulate-able, tomorrow people can do this on their contact-lens supercomputers and anyone can generate a video of anything. Is going back to personally knowing your local representative the only way? How will we vote for national candidates if nobody knows what they think or say?
- qup 3y ago
  People in my circles have been saying this for a few years now, and we've yet to see it happen. I've got my popcorn ready. But you can rest easy. Everyone just votes for the candidate their party picked, anyway.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    It'll happen - deepfakes aren't good enough yet. But when they become ubiquitous and hard to spot, it'll be chaos until the average person is mentally inoculated against believing any video / anything on the internet. I wonder if it's possible to digitally sign footage as it's captured? It'd be nice to have some share-able demonstrably true media. Edit: I'm a centrist and I definitely would lean one way or the other based on who the options are (or who I think they are).
- T-A 3y ago
  > Today a big ML model can do this Not that big: https://github.com/Zejun-Yang/AniPortrait https://github.com/Zejun-Yang/AniPortrait https://huggingface.co/ZJYang/AniPortrait/tree/main https://huggingface.co/ZJYang/AniPortrait/tree/main
  - cchance 3y ago
    Didn't see that one pretty cool, not as good as Emo or Vasa but pretty good
- hx8 3y ago
  Hyper targeted placement of generated content designed to entice you to donate to political campaigns and to vote. Perhaps leading to a point where entire video clips are generated for a single viewer. Politicians and political commentators will lease their likeness and voice out for targeted messaging to be generated using their likeness. Less reputable platforms will allow disinformation campaigns to spread.
SirMaster 3y ago
It looks all warpy and stretchy. That's not how skin and face muscles work. Looks fake to me.
- Zopieux 3y ago
  I find the hairs to be the least realistic, they look elastic, which is unsurprising: highly detailed things like hairs are hard to simulate with good fidelity.
cs702 3y ago
And it's only going to get faster, better, easier, cheaper.[a] Meanwhile, yesterday my credit card company asked me if I wanted to use voice authentication for verifying my identity "more securely" on the phone. Surely the company spent many millions of dollars to enable this new security-theater feature. It begs the question: Is every single executive and manager at my credit card company completely unaware that right now anyone can clone anyone else's voice by obtaining a short sample audio clip taken from any social network? If anyone is aware, why is the company acting like this? Corporate America is so far behind the times it's not even funny. --- [a] With apologies to Daft Punk.
- user_7832 3y ago
  > Is every single executive and manager at my credit card company completely unaware that right now anyone can clone anyone else's voice by obtaining a short sample audio clip taken from any social network? Your mistake is assuming the company cares. The "company" is a hundred different disjointed departments that only care about not getting caught Equifax-style (or filing for bankruptcy if caught). If the marketing director sees a shiny new thing that might boost some random KPI they may not really care about security. However in the rare chance that your bank is actually half decent, I'd suggest contacting their IT/Security teams about your concerns. Maybe you'll save some folks from getting scammed?
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    Also, this feature is probably just some midd level execs plan for a bonus, not a rigorously reviewed and planned. It's also probably in the pipeline for a decade so if they don't push it out, suddenly they get no bonus for cancelling a project. Corporations are ultimately no better than governments and likely worse depending on what their regulatory environment looks like.
    - iamflimflam1 3y ago
      There’s a really important thing here for anyone trying to do sales to big companies. Find an exec that needs a project to advance their career. Make your software that project. Suck in as many other execs into the project so their careers become coupled to getting your software rolled out.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Despite vast investment in AI by VCs and vast numbers of startups in the field, these sort of things remain unavailable as simple consumer installable software. Every second day HN has some post about some new amazing AI system. Never available to download run and use. Why the vast investment and no startup selling consumer downloadable software to do it?
BobaFloutist 3y ago
Oh good!
egberts1 3y ago
Cool! Now we can expect to see an endless stream of dead president's speeches "LIVE" from the White House. This should end well.
smusamashah 3y ago
This is good but nowhere as good as EMO https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/ https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533326) This one has too much fake looking body movement and looks eerie/robotic/uncanny valley. The lips don't sync properly in many places. Eye movement and over all head and body movement is not very natural at all. While EMO looks just perfect mostly. The very first two videos on EMO page are perfect example of that. See the rap near the end to see how good EMO is at lip sync.
- cchance 3y ago
  Another research project with 0 model release
- majkinetor 2y ago
  This is real time!
- ec109685 2y ago
  There were some misses with emo too, but Hepburn at the end was amazing.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> To show off the model, Microsoft created a VASA-1 research page featuring many sample videos of the tool in action With AI stuff, I have learned to be very skeptical until and unless a relatively publicly accessible demo with user specified inputs is available. It is way too easy for humans to cherry pick the nice outputs, or to take advantage of biases in the training data to generate nice outputs, and is not at all reflective of how it holds up in the real world. Part of the reason why ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E had such an impact is the people could try and see for themselves without being told how awesome it was by the people making it.
dang 3y ago
Related: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/microsofts-vasa-1-can-deepfake-a-person-with-one-photo-and-one-audio-track/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/micro... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40088826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40088826, but we merged that thread hither)
thih9 3y ago
I could see this being used in movie production.
fennecbutt 2y ago
Don't know why they're not releasing it right away. If they can do it, so can someone else and hiding it makes it worse. If it's widely available people will quickly realise that the talking head on YT spouting racist BS is AI. This process needs to happen faster. Ofc there will still be people who don't care or understand, but there will always be people who are for example racist and don't care if the affirmation for their beliefs comes from a human or a machine.
lufeofpierrre 2y ago
The people that killed my fam used this to maintain the illusion they were alive for like 4 years and extract informaton etc. On one hand it was nice to see them but on the other a very odd feeling talking to them knowing they were dead (will for sure get down voted but idk trippy interesting skynet moment the usual crowd on HN will never experience)

341 points by vyrotek 3y ago

Wow. Just...wow. I watched one of the videos very carefully. Absolutely natural movements of eyes, eyebrows, lips, even the hair resting on the woman's shoulders. The text even contained a double entendre, and the facial expression was exactly right. Of course, I'm sure that whoever put these demos together also invested time in getting them right. Still: so would anyone seeking to put words in another person's mouth. Imagine your favorite (or least favorite) politician coming out with a speech promoting something awful. Even if the video were immediately debunked, people would remember it. And many people would never believe the debunking. This is the world we now live in: you literally cannot trust anything you see online.

bradley13 2y ago

I see lots of comments wondering what the use-cases for this technology are. It is scary, and it can and will be abused. However, there are a lot of genuine applications. We may or may not like these applications, but they are going to happen. Here are a few, just off the top of my head: - Advertising. Where I am, there is a pervasive commercial with (very realistic) talking goats. Why not do the same thing with people? No need for actors, when you can just tell the computer what you want. - Cinema and television. Especially for bit parts and extras, just create the characters, instead of rounding up a bunch of extras. - Video games and alternate realities. They've been getting more and more realistic - this is just the next step. - Pornography. Again, why trouble yourself with real actors? Sell premium videos customized to each customer. - Politics. Give "live" speeches in different venues, without all the bother of travelling. It's a very small step to answering questions live - just train up an LLM with the responses you want it to give. Lots more applications as well - those are just a few that come to mind.

nowhereai 3y ago

woah. so far not in the news. this is the only article https://www.ai-gen.blog/2024/04/microsoft-vasa-1-ai-technology.html https://www.ai-gen.blog/2024/04/microsoft-vasa-1-ai-technolo...

acidburnNSA 3y ago

Oh no. "Cameras on please!" will be replaced by "AI generated faces off please!" in teams.

darig 3y ago
[dead]

mdrzn 3y ago

Holy shit these are really high quality and basically in realtime on a 4090. What a time to be alive.

rbinv 3y ago
It really is something. 40 FPS on a 4090, damn.

nojvek 3y ago

I like the considerations topic. There’s likely also a an unsaid statement. This is for us only and we’ll be the only ones making money from it with our definition of “safety” and “positive”.

gavi 3y ago

The GPU requirements for realtime video generation are very minimal in the grand scheme of things. Assault on reality itself.

nycdatasci 3y ago

“We have no plans to release an online demo, API, product, additional implementation details, or any related offerings until we are certain that the technology will be used responsibly and in accordance with proper regulations.”

feyman_r 3y ago
/s it doesn’t have the phrase LLM in the title
justinclift 3y ago
> until we are certain that the technology will be used responsibly ... That's basically "never" then, so we'll see how long they hold out. Scammers are already using the existing voice/image/video generation apparently fairly successfully. :(
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Eventually someone will implement one of these really good recent ones as open source and then it will be on replicate etc. right now the open source ones like SadTalker and Video Retalking are not live and are unconvincing.
- spacemanspiff01 3y ago
  Having a delay, where people can see what's coming down the pipe, does have value. In a year there may/will be a open source model. But knowing that this is possible is important to know. I'm fairly clued in, and am constantly surprised at how fast things are changing.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > But knowing that this is possible ... Who knowing this is possible? The general elderly person isn't going to know any time soon. The SV IT people probably will. It's not an even distribution of knowledge. ;/
sitzkrieg 3y ago

qwertox 3y ago

So an ugly person will be able to present his or her ideas on the same visual level as a beautiful person. Is this some sort of democratization?

fullstackchris 3y ago

lol how does something like this get only 50ish votes but some hallucinating video slop generator from some of the other competitors gets thousands?

fluffet 3y ago

This is absolutely crazy. And it'll only get better from here. Imagine "VASA-9" or whatever. I thought deepfakes were still quite a bit away but after this I will have to be way more careful online. It's not far from behind something that can show up in your "YouTube shorts" feed and trick you if you didn't already know it was AI.

smusamashah 3y ago
This is good but nowhere as good as EMO https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/ https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533326) This one has too much movement and looks eerie/robotic/uncanny valley. While EMO looks just perfect.
- vessenes 3y ago
  Hard disagree -- I think you might be misremembering how EMO looks in practice -- I'm sure we'll learn VASA-1 "telltales" but to my eyes there are far fewer than EMO - zero of the EMO videos were 'perfect' for me, and many show little glitches or missing sync. VASA-1 still blinks a bit more than I think is natural, but it looks much more fluid. Both are, BTW, AMAZING!! Pretty crazy.
  - smusamashah 3y ago
    In VASA there is way to much body movement instead of just being he head as if camera is moving in the strong winds. EMO is a lot more human like. In the very first video on the EMO page I still cannot see it as a generated video, its that real. The lip movement, the expressions are in almost in perfect sync with the voice. That is absolutely not the case with VASA

gedy 3y ago

My first thought was "oh no the interview fakes", but then I realized - what if they just kept using the face? Would I care?

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Yeah, even if they just use LLMs to do all the work, or are a LLM themselves, as long as they can do the work I guess. Weird implications for various regulations though.
PeterisP 3y ago
It would be interesting that a remote candidate could easily identify as whatever ethnicity, age or even gender they consider most beneficial for hiring to avoid discrimination or fit certain diversity incentives. Tech like this has the potential to bring us back to the days of "on the Internet, nobody know's you're a dog" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

pxoe 3y ago

maybe making a webpage with 27 videos isn't the greatest web design idea

sitzkrieg 3y ago
the busted two scrolling sections on mobile really doesnt help
zamadatix 2y ago
It's up to your browser on whether those are actually loaded all at once. E.g. on Chrome Desktop with no data saver modes enabled it buffers the first couple seconds of each video then when you play it grabs the remaining MBs for that. That way you can see the videos as quick as you like but not actually have to load all 27 fully just because you opened the page.

IshKebab 3y ago

Oh god don't watch their teeth! Proper creepy. Still, apart from the teeth this looks extremely convincing!

ygjb 3y ago
yeah, teeth, tongue movement and lack of tongue shape and the "stretching" of the skin around the cheeks in the images pushed the videos right into the uncanny valley for me.
mtremsal 3y ago
The teeth resizing dynamically is incredibly distracting, or more positively, a nice way to identify fakes. For now.

ilaksh 3y ago

The paper mentions it uses Diffusion Transformers. The open source implementation that comes up in Google is Facebook Research's PyTorch implementation which is a non-commercial license. https://github.com/facebookresearch/DiT https://github.com/facebookresearch/DiT Is there something equivalent but MIT or Apache? I feel like diffusion transformers are key now. I wonder if OpenAI implemented their SORA stuff from scratch or if they built on the Facebook Research diffusion transformers library. That would be interesting if they violated the non-commercial part. Hm. Found one: https://github.com/milmor/diffusion-transformer-keras https://github.com/milmor/diffusion-transformer-keras

jazzyjackson 3y ago

i get why this is interesting but why is it desirable? real jurassic park "too preoccupied with whether they could" vibes

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Now I can join the meeting "in a suit" while being out paddleboarding!

m3kw9 3y ago

If you see talking heads with static/simple/blurred backgrounds from now on, assume it is fake. In the near future they will accompany realistic backgrounds and even less detectable fakes, we will have to assume all vids could be faked.

Retric 3y ago
I still find the faces themselves to be really obviously wrong. The sound is just off, close enough to tell who is being imitated but not particularly good.
- tredre3 3y ago
  Especially the hair "physics" and sometimes the teeth shift around a bit. But that's nitpicking. It's good enough to fool someone not watching too closely. And the fact that the result is this good with a single photo is truly astonishing, we used to have to train models on thousands of photos for days only to end up with a worse result!
- tyingq 3y ago
  It's interesting to me that some of the long-standing things are still there. For example, lots of people with an earring in only one ear, unlikely asymmetry in the shape or size of their ears, etc.
hypeatei 3y ago
I wonder how video evidence in court is going to be affected by this. Both from a defense and prosecution perspective. Technically videos could've been faked before but it would require a ton of effort and skill that no average person would have.
- greenavocado 3y ago
  There will be a new cottage industry of AI detectives that serve as expert witnesses and they will attest to the originality of media to the court
- 3y ago

metalspoon 3y ago

AI can talk with me. Why need a friend in real life?

alfalfasprout 3y ago

What this is starting to reveal is that there's a clear need for some kind of chain of custody system that guarantees the authenticity of what we see. Nikon/Canon tried doing this in the past, but improper storage of private keys lead to vulnerabilities. As far as I'm aware it's never extended to video either. With modern secure hardware keys it may yet be possible. The difficulty is that any kind of photo/video manipulation would break the signature (and there are practical reasons to want to be able to edit videos obviously). In the ideal world, any mutation to the original source content could be traceable to the original source content. But that's not an easy problem to solve.

throw__away7391 3y ago
No, we are merely returning to the pre-photography state of things where a mere printed image is not sufficient evidence for anything.
- tass 3y ago
  There goes the dashcam industry…
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    You're being downvoted but I think the comment raises a good question. what will happen when someone gets accused of doctoring their dashcam footage? Or any footage used for evidence.
    - tass 2y ago
      I wasn’t really kidding with my comment. I just recently used camera footage as part of an accident claim and the assessor immediately said “that wasn’t your fault, we take responsibility on behalf of the driver”. In a few years time when (if) faking realistic footage becomes trivial, I suspect this kind of video will have a much, much higher level of scrutiny or only be accepted from certain sources such as government owned traffic cameras.
- 3y ago

TriangleEdge 3y ago

Why is this research being done? Is this some kind of arms race? The only purpose of this technology I can think of is getting spies to abuse others. Am I going to have to do AuthN and AuthZ on every phone call and zoom now?

Arnavion 3y ago
On the other hand, if deepfaking becomes common enough that everyone stops trusting everything they read / see on the internet, it would be a net good against the spread of disinformation compared to today.
- hiatus 3y ago
  I don't see that as an outcome. We have already seen a grand erosion of trust in institutions. Moving to an even lower trust society does not sound like it would have positive consequences for discourse, public policy, or society at large.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Ironically low effort deep fakes might increase trust in organizations that have had the budget to fake stuff since their inception. The losers are 'citizen journalist' broadcasting on Youtube etc.
  - throwthrowuknow 3y ago
    The benefit is that you can only trust in person interaction with social and governmental institutions so people will have to leave their damn house again and go talk to each other face to face. Too many of our current problems are caused by people only interacting with each other and the world through third parties who are performing a MITM operation for their own benefit.
    - 1attice 3y ago
      This assumes that it's a two-way door. Over the past century and a half, we've moved into vast, anonymous spaces, where I'm as likely to know and get along with my neighbour as I am to win the lottery. And this is important. No, it's not just a matter of putting on an effort to learn who my neighbour is -- my neighbour is literally someone whose life experiences are wildly different, whose social outcomes will be wildly different, whose beliefs and values are wildly different, and, for all I know, goes to conferences about how to eliminate me and my kind. (This last part is not speculation; I'm trans; see: CPAC) And these are my reasons. My neighbour is probably equivalently terrified of me, or what I represent, or the media I consume, or the conferences that I go to. Generalizing, you can't take a bunch of random people whose only bond is that they share meatspace-proximity, draw a circle around them, and declare them a community; those communities are _gone_, and you can no more bring them back than you can revive a corpse. (This would also probably not be a good idea, even if it were possible: they were also incredibly uncomfortable places for anyone who didn't fit in, and we have generations of fiction about people risking everything to leave for those big anonymous cities we created in step 1.) So, here we are, dependent on technology to stay in touch with far-flung friends and lovers and family, all of us, scattered like spiderwebs across the globe, and now into the strands drips a poison. Daniel Dennett was right. Counterfeit people are an enormous danger to civilization. Research like this should stop immediately.

balls187 3y ago

I'm curious what is the reason for deepfake research and what the practical application is. Can someone explain the commercial need to take someones likeness and generate video content? If I was an a-list celebrity, I would give permission for coke to make a commercial with my likeness, provided I am allowed final approval of the finished ad? Do I have an avatar that attends my zoom work calls?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hypeatei 3y ago
Entertainment maybe? I know that's not necessarily an ethical reason but some have made hilarious AI-generated songs already.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
The purpose is to give remote workers the ability to clone themselves and automate their many jobs. /s (but actually, because laziness is the driver of all innovation, I wouldn't be surprised if this happens).
JamesBarney 3y ago
Video games, entertainment, and avatars seems like the big ones.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  If that is really the reason then this is insane and everyone involved should put their keyboards down and stop what they are doing. This would be as if we invented and sold nuclear weapons to dig out quarry mines faster. The inconvenience it saves us quickly disappears into the overwhelming shadow of the enormous harm now enabled.
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    > This would be as if we invented and sold nuclear weapons to dig out quarry mines faster. ”Project Plowshare was the overall United States program for the development of techniques to use nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes.”[0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

physhster 3y ago

A fantastic technological advance for election interference!

RGamma 3y ago
Such an exciting startup idea! I'm thrilled!
IshKebab 3y ago
As if this technology was needed.

karaterobot 3y ago

We need some clear legislation around this right now.

stronglikedan 3y ago
counterpoint: we don't need any more legislation
- qwertox 3y ago
  I tend towards agreeing with you. Many of the problems, like impersonation, are already illegal. And replacing a person which spreads lies, as can be seen in most TV or glossy cover ads, shouldn't trigger some new legal action. The only difference is that now the actor is also a lie. And countries which use actors or news anchors for spreading propaganda surely won't see an issue with replacing them with AI characters. People who then get to read that their most favorite, stunningly beautiful Instagram or TikTok influencer is nothing but a fat, chips-eating ugly person using AI, may try to raise some legal issues to soothe their disappointment. They then might raise a point which sounds reasonable, but which would then force politicians to also tackle the lies which are spread in TV/Magazines ads. Maybe clearly labeling any use of this tech, maybe even with a QR code linking to who is the owner of the AI, similar to QR codes on meat packaging which allow you to track the origin of the meat, would be something what laws could be helpful with, in the spirit of transparency.
4ndrewl 3y ago
In which jurisdiction?
- karaterobot 3y ago
  What jurisdiction would not benefit from legislation around duplicating people's identities using AI?
CamperBob2 3y ago
Legislation only impairs the good guys.

binkHN 3y ago

Full details at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/

FredPret 3y ago

Anyone have any good ideas for how we're going to do politics now? Today a big ML model can do this and it's somewhat regulate-able, tomorrow people can do this on their contact-lens supercomputers and anyone can generate a video of anything. Is going back to personally knowing your local representative the only way? How will we vote for national candidates if nobody knows what they think or say?

qup 3y ago
People in my circles have been saying this for a few years now, and we've yet to see it happen. I've got my popcorn ready. But you can rest easy. Everyone just votes for the candidate their party picked, anyway.
- FredPret 3y ago
  It'll happen - deepfakes aren't good enough yet. But when they become ubiquitous and hard to spot, it'll be chaos until the average person is mentally inoculated against believing any video / anything on the internet. I wonder if it's possible to digitally sign footage as it's captured? It'd be nice to have some share-able demonstrably true media. Edit: I'm a centrist and I definitely would lean one way or the other based on who the options are (or who I think they are).
T-A 3y ago
> Today a big ML model can do this Not that big: https://github.com/Zejun-Yang/AniPortrait https://github.com/Zejun-Yang/AniPortrait https://huggingface.co/ZJYang/AniPortrait/tree/main https://huggingface.co/ZJYang/AniPortrait/tree/main
- cchance 3y ago
  Didn't see that one pretty cool, not as good as Emo or Vasa but pretty good
hx8 3y ago
Hyper targeted placement of generated content designed to entice you to donate to political campaigns and to vote. Perhaps leading to a point where entire video clips are generated for a single viewer. Politicians and political commentators will lease their likeness and voice out for targeted messaging to be generated using their likeness. Less reputable platforms will allow disinformation campaigns to spread.

SirMaster 3y ago

It looks all warpy and stretchy. That's not how skin and face muscles work. Looks fake to me.

Zopieux 3y ago
I find the hairs to be the least realistic, they look elastic, which is unsurprising: highly detailed things like hairs are hard to simulate with good fidelity.

cs702 3y ago

And it's only going to get faster, better, easier, cheaper.[a] Meanwhile, yesterday my credit card company asked me if I wanted to use voice authentication for verifying my identity "more securely" on the phone. Surely the company spent many millions of dollars to enable this new security-theater feature. It begs the question: Is every single executive and manager at my credit card company completely unaware that right now anyone can clone anyone else's voice by obtaining a short sample audio clip taken from any social network? If anyone is aware, why is the company acting like this? Corporate America is so far behind the times it's not even funny. --- [a] With apologies to Daft Punk.

user_7832 3y ago
> Is every single executive and manager at my credit card company completely unaware that right now anyone can clone anyone else's voice by obtaining a short sample audio clip taken from any social network? Your mistake is assuming the company cares. The "company" is a hundred different disjointed departments that only care about not getting caught Equifax-style (or filing for bankruptcy if caught). If the marketing director sees a shiny new thing that might boost some random KPI they may not really care about security. However in the rare chance that your bank is actually half decent, I'd suggest contacting their IT/Security teams about your concerns. Maybe you'll save some folks from getting scammed?
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  Also, this feature is probably just some midd level execs plan for a bonus, not a rigorously reviewed and planned. It's also probably in the pipeline for a decade so if they don't push it out, suddenly they get no bonus for cancelling a project. Corporations are ultimately no better than governments and likely worse depending on what their regulatory environment looks like.
  - iamflimflam1 3y ago
    There’s a really important thing here for anyone trying to do sales to big companies. Find an exec that needs a project to advance their career. Make your software that project. Suck in as many other execs into the project so their careers become coupled to getting your software rolled out.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Despite vast investment in AI by VCs and vast numbers of startups in the field, these sort of things remain unavailable as simple consumer installable software. Every second day HN has some post about some new amazing AI system. Never available to download run and use. Why the vast investment and no startup selling consumer downloadable software to do it?

BobaFloutist 3y ago

Oh good!

egberts1 3y ago

Cool! Now we can expect to see an endless stream of dead president's speeches "LIVE" from the White House. This should end well.

smusamashah 3y ago

This is good but nowhere as good as EMO https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/ https://humanaigc.github.io/emote-portrait-alive/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533326) This one has too much fake looking body movement and looks eerie/robotic/uncanny valley. The lips don't sync properly in many places. Eye movement and over all head and body movement is not very natural at all. While EMO looks just perfect mostly. The very first two videos on EMO page are perfect example of that. See the rap near the end to see how good EMO is at lip sync.

cchance 3y ago
Another research project with 0 model release
majkinetor 2y ago
This is real time!
ec109685 2y ago
There were some misses with emo too, but Hepburn at the end was amazing.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> To show off the model, Microsoft created a VASA-1 research page featuring many sample videos of the tool in action With AI stuff, I have learned to be very skeptical until and unless a relatively publicly accessible demo with user specified inputs is available. It is way too easy for humans to cherry pick the nice outputs, or to take advantage of biases in the training data to generate nice outputs, and is not at all reflective of how it holds up in the real world. Part of the reason why ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E had such an impact is the people could try and see for themselves without being told how awesome it was by the people making it.

dang 3y ago

Related: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/microsofts-vasa-1-can-deepfake-a-person-with-one-photo-and-one-audio-track/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/micro... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40088826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40088826, but we merged that thread hither)

thih9 3y ago

I could see this being used in movie production.

fennecbutt 2y ago

Don't know why they're not releasing it right away. If they can do it, so can someone else and hiding it makes it worse. If it's widely available people will quickly realise that the talking head on YT spouting racist BS is AI. This process needs to happen faster. Ofc there will still be people who don't care or understand, but there will always be people who are for example racist and don't care if the affirmation for their beliefs comes from a human or a machine.

lufeofpierrre 2y ago

The people that killed my fam used this to maintain the illusion they were alive for like 4 years and extract informaton etc. On one hand it was nice to see them but on the other a very odd feeling talking to them knowing they were dead (will for sure get down voted but idk trippy interesting skynet moment the usual crowd on HN will never experience)