Become a 2D girl as DeepFake comes to anime

Take the principles and techniques of Deep Learning and combine them with pure fakery, and you end up with DeepFake. Deep Learning is a branch of the Machine Learning tree. DeepFake is now the technique in which computer algorithms fake videos so that the actors look different.

DeepFake has become notorious for porn. Celebrities are faked into scenes they would never be a part of, their countenance replacing that of the pornstar. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

YouTube channel Ctrl Shift Face has some amazing DeepFake demos.

Here’s the scene from the Matrix when Neo, played by a young Bruce Lee, takes on Fishburne’s Morpheus.

Except, as you remember, it was actually Keanu Reeves who was playing Neo.

DeepFake comes to anime

And now a Tokyo start-up called AlgoAge has put together an algorithm that lets them upload a single anime face and a recording of a voice only for the machine learning the to animate the face into speech.

It’s both impressive and underwhelming at the same time. The face changes; the lips move, the area around the mouth moves, and there are even blinks. It’s a good animation. But nothing else changes.

You cannot yet use the system yourself, but that day may come soon.

Even as an animation technique, it’s easy to see implications for AlgoAge. A director could change the script of an animation (not necessarily an anime) at the last minute without the need to redraw. You could be an anime character on your Twitch channel if it works in real time.