The Incredible Creativity of Deepfakes and the Worrying Future of AI | Tom Graham | TED

foreign your company became prominent on the internet with the release of a fake Tom Cruise video deep Tom Cruise that I think attracted like a billion views on Tick Tock and Instagram which leads me to my first question which is please can we at Ted have our own Tom Cruise video please uh you know I thought you might ask so um a little earlier we we

had a crack maybe we'll have a look let's have a look what's up internet I'm north of the Border a at the Ted conference it's not short for Theodore but nobody calls me Thomas so it's cool it's Tom and Ted yes uh Canada seriously though everybody here very nice very polite especially the whales I mean that so really at metaphysic we specialize in creating artificially generated

content that looks and feels exactly like reality so we take kind of real world data we train these neural Nets and it can more accurately than the effects or CGI really create this content but looks and feels so natural um and so that is a great example of the AI being kind of prompted by the natural performance of a person and kind of the face goes

on top and it helps the fact that your co-founder is um you know he's a pretty good Tom Cruise impersonation indeed Miles Fisher is uh the foremost Tom Cruise but not Tom Cruise um I think you have another example as well can we see that one yes absolutely going kind of Beyond faces now talking about voice [Music] [Music] [Music] tell us what's happening there so what

you see there is really it is the singing voice of the lady singing Spanish um and aloe black who sings Wake Me Up the Avicii song that he wrote with Avicii um we are transporting her voice across to his face so he doesn't sing in Spanish and then suddenly we transport it again um her voice into his voice so anybody in the future will be able

to speak any language it'll look Perfectly Natural and this content is becoming more and more easy to create and eventually it will end up with a scale where we will all be kind of main characters in our own content on the internet okay [Laughter] before we dig into that just a bit I mean this what you've shown us um recorded video there um rumor has it

you can also do this with live video can that be right yes we can do it live real time and this is like really at The Cutting Edge of what we can do today moving from offline processing to we're processing it so fast that you can do it in real time and so well I'm going to challenge you and your team to do a bit of

a first yeah I mean there's video of you right up on that screen show us something surprising you couldn't oh my gosh so wait so there we go this is um you know a live real-time model of Chris um on top of me um running in real time and next you'll tell me that it can oh Lord I'm so uncomfortable with this I am so uncomfortable

Can it can it do voice as well um um we think they can we're we're really pushing we're really pushing a limit said AI technology now and I'm talking exactly as I've heard Scrambler is coming out is the one in Italian for sensing I am I am I'm deeply sorry everyone subject to you to this you know that there's something possibly even worse so to come

clean on this they made me you know I did some they took some shots of me a couple weeks ago doing different facial expressions that they captured a video model and it turns out I discovered this week that they can apply that not just to Tom but to anyone um and um so my my dear friend Sonny Bates is here in the front row Sunny do

you consent to uh to channel inner me for a minute well let's can we try that I'm really worried about this do we have sunny on screen oh this they're Sunny oh no oh no oh no [Laughter] I you know Chris you look amazing all right enough of that cut that cut that cut that right now I mean yes more Sunny more of this Tom Tom

Sunny Bates is the woman who introduced me to Ted without Sonny Bates none of us would actually be here now and we do we reward her with this I mean and now you've finally become the master you know oh so look okay amazing um it obviously occurs to everyone in this room that there are some things that can go horribly wrong with this um and you

know we've already seen you know examples online of you know what we've had photographs of trump being arrested that were unreal there could be video of it um there's pornography that can use the faces of celebrity all these things that we've seen Deepak how how do you feel about the downside of this technology so personally you know we build this stuff and I'm worried right worried

is the right Instinct for everybody to have and then you know beyond that think about you know what can we do to prepare ourselves how can we try to impact the future as it spirals in this direction where as individuals it's going to be kind of difficult to understand what's computer generated and what's real and so there are things that we can do there raising public

awareness of manipulated media that's one that's you know this is a great forum for that will you claim to me that if you were to shut down your company right now it wouldn't stop the problem of deep fake videos because the Technologies out there that that's going to happen anyway that that's not within your control yes there are we're talking about content that is so compelling

if you know we put any of ourselves inside content and maybe it is talking to our loved ones or just talking to our friends on the beach and it's so realistic that it looks real it's so compelling everybody is trying to create this content today all of the gpus in the universe are driving it trying to create this so it doesn't matter what any one person

does this will happen and it's happening very very quickly so I mean we'll talk about the upside in a second but the but it seems like we are going to have to get used to a world where we and our children will no longer be able to trust the evidence of our eyes I think so um we're going to have to understand a new set of

Institutions to verify what is authentic media but then we can begin to lead into some of the creative things that happen from it and there are benefits that come with that too so it'll be an accommodation so talk a bit about the uh the the benefits I mean obviously on the entertainment side there's an amazing number of possibilities you have Tom Cruise we can have impossible

mission 273 in the year 21.50 right like he will be with us forever we're working on number 75 000 one net right now yeah I guess that I guess that is kind of amazing like we love we've we love lots of people in the world and we want the possibility that with their permission we can do more with them talk about some other possible upsides what

we've seen in kind of building this content and watching people interact with it especially if they're kind of interacting with themselves maybe it's their younger 20 year old self or maybe they're interacting with their partner but the young version of their partner there's this tremendous emotional connection that comes from the very very photorealistic Beyond The Uncanny kind of content and so if we can start deploying

that um among regular people if we can scale it up so that it works for any kind of person then we can begin to kind of you know have more interesting meaningful human kind of interactions and relationships online and since the pandemic we all spend more time online but it's chat and it's email if we could get more human emotion more feeling there's a lot that

we can do with that right and so you know education is a good example we could have an inspiring teacher in thousands of classrooms around the world speaking every language in the world at the same time and students could interact with each other in a way that was you know goes beyond Zoom there can be real cultural exchange real socialization there's a lot that we can

do Beyond you so that teacher example is is powerful to me like like the fact that a single teacher could turn a written lesson into video in any number of languages and extend indefinitely that seems like a real amplification of potentially of good you know human intent um I'm excited by that I still don't get the family side of it like that like if you want

to have a human connection with someone in your family isn't it like how won't people just be creeped out by oh my God I was just looking at your avatar I thought I thought it was you you know like how do we get isn't that just creepy I I think this is definitely a creepy element to this right and then you go beyond that and the

creepiness drops away and the medium drops away and it's the content and the connection that's there so you know I imagine that you know if I collect data from my grandparents who are very old today then in the future I'll be able to relive experiences with them and communicate with them and that it's not going to be any good for them right they're probably going to

have passed on but for me it'll help me process who I am my relationship with them that idea of kind of decoupling Human Experience both from where it happens and the moment in time that it happens I think that we can create these experiences through hyper real photorealistic media that allow us to share the best of our experiences the best of who we are I'm going

to be very curious to see who's who can feel that right now my guess is that there's going to have to be lots of experiments and a lot of things are going to creep us out and maybe we'll find some things that are just absolutely incredible but I have an important question for you which is how the hell do I control me now hour like you've

got me on video what's to stop my me being misused across the internet now that's right I think that as we kind of allow companies to create these realistic experiences as individuals we need to be empowered to own our real world data the data used to train the algorithms and we need to control how our photorealistic avatars are created and where they're used so to this

extent I was looking at kind of conventional current legal institutions to see what we could do to create new rights so I created a photorealistic avatar of myself submitted it to the US copyright office to see if they would register my copyright in it and this is what the video looked like here is the AI realistic version of myself even if the appearance of this AI

representation of myself may change cosmetically or if I change my hair or add creative features my intention is to create this AI version of myself that embodies the essence of who I am as a person under any circumstance wow so I think you have shown us what is going to be a repeated theme in this conference which is the future is going to be weird and

wonderful at the same time quite what the balance is between those two TBD but this is a world where each of us is going to have to think differently about who we are and claim these rights what you're saying is that if people have this right you can picture a world where for example if a video goes viral on YouTube without your consent you'll be able

to take it down because of some link back to this that's right I think the most important thing that we can do when we're talking about data from a real world being able to power these things is that we need to own property rights over the data we shouldn't sign it over to companies through terms of service we shouldn't give it away if you fundamentally own

it then you can be in control and you're at the ground level of all of the economies and all of the use cases that are going to spin up through history it's a lot but uh we're on the way now Tom Graham thank you so much for sharing this technology thank you very much and sunny Bates I'm so sorry thank you so much