Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí once said in an interview, "I believe in general in death, but in the death of Dali, absolutely not." Now, the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, has worked to fulfill the painter's prophecy by bringing him back to life — with a deepfake.
The exhibition, called Dalí Lives, was made in collaboration with the ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), which made a life-size re-creation of Dalí using the machine learning-powered video editing technique. Using archival footage from interviews, GS&P pulled over 6,000 frames and used 1,000 hours of machine learning to train the AI algorithm on Dalí's face. His facial expressions were then imposed over an actor with Dalí's body proportions, and quotes from his interviews and letters were synced with a voice actor who could mimic his unique accent, a mix of French, Spanish, and English.
Deepfake videos are usually associated with fake celebrity porn, the dangers that come from fake news, or the possibility of making political figures say volatile things. The technology is easily available for anyone to use. GS&P technical director Nathan Shipley, says he pulled the code from GitHub. Shipley believes that Dalí Lives may be the first time a cultural institution has used deepfakes for artistic purposes. It's hard to think of another artist who would be better suited for this than Dalí.
Via: The Verge
This is both amazing and frightening.
But yeah, I want a pic.