YouTube videos of 6K celebrities helped train AI model to animate photos in real time.
On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.
Someone is always bound to make this someday. At least the maker is announcing it which is decent enough. Actually, I have always thought that if AI can generate image and voice, what is stopping someone from identity theft? And BAM, we are now in an age where digital data will soon be unreliable unless we have protocol in-place to prove the origin of the data.
We're going to need strong digital signatures on everything, and we need it fast, else we won't be able to believe anything we see. It will be Steve Bannon's "flood the zone with shit" dream come true.
This is impressive and terrifying as hell… I’m pretty tech savvy and have watched other AI videos, but if you presented this to me as real, I’d totally believe it! Especially I can imagine it being spliced with B roll footage and maybe “real” footage to make it even more believable. I’m floored…
No. No, they can't. This shit still takes lots and lots of training data.
It's just like any job. You can't just fully fake something in one day. At best, you might get 60% of the way there, maybe 80% after adding on some generic experience. But, you're not going to fully mimic anything without lots of training and experience.
On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track.
In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.
To show off the model, Microsoft created a VASA-1 research page featuring many sample videos of the tool in action, including people singing and speaking in sync with pre-recorded audio tracks.
The examples also include some more fanciful generations, such as Mona Lisa rapping to an audio track of Anne Hathaway performing a "Paparazzi" song on Conan O'Brien.
While the Microsoft researchers tout potential positive applications like enhancing educational equity, improving accessibility, and providing therapeutic companionship, the technology could also easily be misused.
"We are opposed to any behavior to create misleading or harmful contents of real persons, and are interested in applying our technique for advancing forgery detection," write the researchers.
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