Oxford scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can create fake videos of a person by using their still image and an audio clip.
The system works by first identifying facial features using face-recognition algorithms. As the audio clip plays, the system then manipulates the mouth of the person in the still image so that it looks as if they are speaking.
Although the results are not absolutely perfect, researchers believe that the software could soon make realistically fake videos only a single click away.
“The application were thinking of is redubbing a video into another language,” said Joon Son Chung at University of Oxford in the UK.
In the future, the audio from news clips could be automatically translated into another language and the images updated to fit. The new method could be useful for redubbing animated movies, the New Scientist reported.
Given enough time, experts can already create fake videos that are virtually indistinguishable from genuine ones.
Artificially intelligent tools are making the process so quick and easy, that eventually almost anybody could do it, researchers said.