Deepfakes Can Help You Dance

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Bruno Mars begins dancing to his hit pop song halfway through the YouTube clip, titled Everybody Dance Now, but the video’s real star is Tinghui Zhou. A gangly coder in skinny jeans, Zhou appears on the right side of the frame and, at first, flails his arms without rhythm. A split second later he’s moving exactly like Mars. Zhou and his research colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley had used a form of artificial intelligence technology called generative adversarial networks (GANs) to copy the steps, with only the occasional glitch.

In the year since the clip went viral, Zhou has turned his team’s research into a startup called Humen AI, which aims to turn the video gimmick into an app and, eventually, a paid service for Hollywood studios, video game developers, and ad agencies. The 29-year-old has also run smack into a wave of public panic about “deepfakes,” synthetic media manipulations assisted by machines. Like the Bruno Mars mimicry, deepfakes don’t have to be perfect; this spring, a fake clip of Nancy Pelosi slurring her speech, edited with tech barely more advanced than Photoshop, ricocheted across the web. Congress has held hearings on the subject.

Symantec Corp., a cybersecurity company, has found three instances in which financial fraudsters successfully impersonated chief executive officers. Women’s faces and bodies have been plastered into porn. Somewhat less troubling are startups with names such as Lyrebird and Synesthesia, which sell artificially generated audio or images to marketers making commercials or chatbots. Blue chip investors have funded Brud, whose virtual Instagram star, Lil Miquela, poses and hawks brands to her 1.6 million followers in the same manner as flesh-and-blood influencers.

The general alarm over online disinformation and privacy means that new companies are thinking about the what-ifs of their technology in ways earlier startups didn’t. Humen says it’s working to allay suspicions by keeping its library of videoswholesome. Users can edit themselves into fun music videos or bendy yoga poses, not orgies or shooting sprees. “It’s like a sandbox,” Zhou says. “Dances, gestures, greetings. Not, like, crazy Nazi salutes.” In advance of the app’s release later this year, Humen has posted a “digital human Bill of Rights” on its website, with precepts such as “We will fight against unauthorized use of your data.” The company is also testing ways to automatically detect manipulated footage and flag it with a watermark that identifies it as phony.

Users who violate the rules should expect to be barred from posting footage to the app, says Signia Venture Partners co-founder Sunny Dhillon, who’s put some of the company’s money into Humen. He compares the policy to the community standards of YouTube and Twitch, though, he adds, “we want to do a lot better than that.” The other two platforms aren’t exactly known for responsible oversight and are now hastily assembling rules around deepfakes.

There’s no guarantee that Humen will be able to protect consumers from what deepfakes might unleash. Most deepfake startups have some ethical rules but aren’t investing enough in hiring experts to help them mitigate risks of malicious use, says Aviv Ovadya, a technologist who studies deepfakes and has consulted with Humen. Linda Ricci, a consultant who’s worked in virtual reality and film, says Hollywood will eat up GANs technology, and that may not be a good thing. “The technologist and the artist in me thinks this is fantastic,” she says. “The flip side: It’s a scary, scary trend.”

Humen, which raised $2 million in funding after posting the YouTube clip, is still sorting out where it draws lines. Over the past year, Zhou says, he’s received dozens of unsolicited requests from people who want to dance the way he did. Many also want him to record footage of loved ones so they can have virtual copies even after those loved ones have died. “Some people think it’s kind of creepy,” he says. “We’re still debating that.”
 
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To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeff Muskus at jmuskus@bloomberg.net, Howard Chua-Eoan

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