Video Rewrite (1997)

Video Rewrite (1997) 

First Deepfake

Video

Trivia:

1) Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate visual and audio content that can more easily deceive. The main machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based on deep learning and involve training generative neural network architectures, such as autoencoders,or generative adversarial networks (GANs).

2) Video Rewrite program, published in 1997 modified existing video footage of a person speaking to depict that person mouthing the words contained in a different audio track.  It was the first system to fully automate this kind of facial reanimation, and it did so using machine learning techniques to make connections between the sounds produced by a video's subject and the shape of the subject's face.

3) Presented on Siggraph (1997).

4) Contemporary academic projects have focused on creating more realistic videos and on improving techniques. The "Synthesizing Obama" program, published in 2017, modifies video footage of former president Barack Obama to depict him mouthing the words contained in a separate audio track.

5) One of the most advanced deepfake videos is The Shining starring Jim Carrey (2019)