Artificial Intelligence Creates Fake Faces —and They Are as Real as It Gets

The uncanny valley of AI love.

In 2001, Steven Spielberg directed the movie, Ai: Artificial Intelligence, it was about a boy who is looking for love, the thing is—he isn’t real.

This year, we have become isolated, and technology is what is keeping us connected. We have become digital nomads, escaping to a world, that is both artificial and augmented.

AI or Artificial Intelligence, is working behind the scenes in our daily lives. From the movies and videos we watch online, and to what we buy online. Every recommendation tech companies tell us, all made possible with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

In our homes, we talk to Alexa, we communicate with it like it is a real person. Even if we dont know anything about AI, it is here and it is everywhere. Artificial intelligence is helping scientists and pharmaceutical companies find a cure for Covid-19. The news that a vaccine is underway, as early as December 2020, could only happen because of AI.

Time is of the essence. AI allowed pharmaceutical companies to automate processes and helped expedite the development of a vaccine or drugs that can cure Covid-19.

AI is neutral, what we do with it, have great consequences.

The New York Times reports that with Artificial Intelligence, companies are creating fake faces. The fake faces, don’t look like anything we have seen before, they aren’t robotic faces.

They look like you and me. Because these fake faces once belong to a real person, a real face, and through machine learning created new faces from thousands of data sets. It is customizable, based on any physical attributes, emotions, or moods, like a happy or a sad face, think of it, as the shoe fits.

In 2013, there was this movie, called Her, the lead character, Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, fell in love with a computer operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and in the not so distant future, it can happen or is already here.

Love comes in different forms, and with AI, love can become real when we have a face to look at, to fall in love with, one who never grows old or leaves us.

Virtual Love: The uncanny valley of AI love can be real or not?

Mystic Messenger is a game for women looking to live their virtual love story online. Love in the time of AI is as real as it gets for some women who pursue a romance with a character from the game.

The world can be lonely, cruel to lovers, and those looking for love. When the standard of beauty is only skin deep. When the youth is celebrated and when in our old age, we only find ourselves.

Shortly, AI could help us get through some tough times in our lives. In our isolation, we can order a person, not a real one, a made-up lover, a made-up friend, someone who will talk and listen to us, or even love us back.

Fake people for sale

Generated Photos, a company that sells “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99, or 1,000 people for $1,000 is clear with their user agreement.

Namely, you can not use our photos to conduct any sort of illegal activity, such as defamation, impersonation, or fraud.

All this is possible with a new type of artificial intelligence called generative adversarial network or (GAN).

Overview of GAN Structure

A generative adversarial network (GAN) has two parts:

1. The generator learns to generate plausible data. The generated instances become negative training examples for the discriminator.

2. The discriminator learns to distinguish the generator’s fake data from real data. The discriminator penalizes the generator for producing implausible results.

When training begins, the generator produces obviously fake data, and the discriminator quickly learns to tell that it’s fake.

The dark side of all this is that fake faces can become fake identities and it has happened, fake news penned by bad actors hiding behind a fake face and identity.

In the past, when the technology isn’t as advanced as it is now, Data sets can be manipulated and can fall victim to our human biases, a case in point when Google mistakenly labeled black people as gorillas.

A false facial recognition match could lead to the arrest of the wrong person, as in the case of Robert Williams.

Technology is moving at the speed of great innovation. It is only a matter of time when we will not be able to tell the difference between what is real or not. The face you are looking at, is made up of numbers, of binary digits 0 & 1, or as a result of mathematical equations run through powerful computers.

I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley. — Masahiro Mori

The possibility is endless. The things Artificial Intelligence wasn’t meant to be, like causing and inflicting harm in our society are already happening. We have seen AI deployed to carry out nefarious activities, like spreading fake news by bots, and bad actors. All these are happening not because of the technology of Artificial Intelligence but of how we use it.

The uncanny valley, a concept conceived by Masahiro Mori, then a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, may no longer be true, as there will come a time when humanity’s affinity towards Artificial Intelligence will be a function of blurring lines.

The near future is sooner than you think, are you ready?