Doing the research and preparation for my talk on Surviving the AI Revolution: Strategies and Tools for Thriving in the Future of Tech one of the items I was using as an analogy for joining multiple tools together to get a result I used a face swap.
My basic premise was I “needed” a picture of myself that wasn’t easy or readily available. There’s a bunch of ways I could have achieved the same goal but for the purposes of my talk I used Midjourney and a face swap plug-in.
I had a recentish single image of myself taken at Update Conference (side note: awesome conference – go if you can):
And I wanted to make new versions of me:
- a fun one – jungle theme
- a professional one – a more professional looking headshot that I’d ever take
One of my biggest challenges was to get a prompt to with a female to look like me.
I quickly discovered the hairline was quite key. I have a noticable widow’s peak so making sure the generated people had the same feature took the swaps from looking weird (uncanny valley) to more like me.
The fun jungle theme
This one was probably the easier of the two. As i was going for a female, jungle inspired by Indiana Jones this one being more stylised was ok. I went through a few variations and there were quite a few ok ones. This one ended up being my favourite. Clearly a lot younger, no greys but with a hat on that’s harder to tell on my anyways.
Many of the others the outfit was a bit more revealing which at the time looked ok but as soon as my face was on there looked wrong … I am not a lot cut top wearer.
Once swapped this was the result. I think it did a pretty good job – my eyebrows, eyes etc are quite different to the output.
When I posted this photo – with full disclosure that it was fake – I was surprised how many people skipped over that bit and assumed the photo was real and was taken as a dress up at Movie World or something. The other interesting thing to this was even though many knew it was fake after reading it they said it was a keeper as it was very “me”.
The professional head shot
This one was the harder of the two. As I’m mid 40’s with some grey and I don’t wear makeup it was harder to get a good equivalent woman generated. This is where the bias of the training data really showed I think.
I could either get professional looking with no grey hair or with grey hair the setting was casual.
First the grey hair version:
This was by far the most professional looking version it generated but even then the background looks like it was taken at home. Again the top is quite ‘open’ so the swap resulted in this
Again the swap is reasonable but this one didn’t fool anyone.
Out of all the professional generation iterations I found this one the best. No greys, very smoothed out skin but starting to edge towards the right age group.
This swap was by far the most convincing for most people
Again, even though I posted this explicitly saying it was a face swap I had a lot of people comment on my lovely new haircut and asked me where I got the photo done. I also had a lot of people say they wish I hadn’t told them cause now they can’t honestly say whether they would have been fooled because I gave the game away. I did try a few just sending the pic and waiting before I said it was fake. The 2 main reasons that people thought it was fake….
- The top was too low cut for me
- I looked too comfortable in that much makeup in front of a camera
Thoughts on Responsibility
I’ve done a lot of discussions discouraging face-swapping, deep fakes etc. Honestly I can talk about it a lot of you can just go and look up Noelle Martin – from Perth who was instrumental in getting a bunch of key legislation in place after her experience with deep fakes – watch her YouTube videos.
Here, I’ve done them with my own images. I knew doing this I was face-swapping myself. When I used these images and showed them in my talk I disclosed they were face swaps. At the time I thought I was being responsible.
What made me really think about it more was the number of comments from people loving my photos. The people the looked and didn’t read that I fool unintentionally. Is disclosing enough (just like a giant terms of use you assume ppl won’t read) to relinquish my duties to be responsible toying with these technologies? Should I have instead stamped a giant red FAKE across the image? Should I have even toyed with this technology in the first place.