Your Instagram wall could actually help Deepfake software and apps create a high definition revenge porn of you !!!

Yes, you read it right. Deepfake technology can create a HIGH DEFINITION pornographic video of you in several minutes using several good pictures of you available on your Facebook or Instagram walls.

Imagine scrolling down the internet and finding a a humiliating video, probably a pornographic video you didn't take part in. Deepfake ( a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") is a technology where an existing video or a picture is replaced with elements of the developer's choice. 

Deepfake is nothing new and has been there for a lot of time with fakes created using graphic development software like Adobe Photoshop. But with the advancement of powerful techniques like machine learning  and artificial intelligence deepfakes have reached a high potential and high definition content can be created easily.

Deepfakes have been grabbing attention lately as this technology has been used on creating celebrity porn, revenge , fake news, hoaxes and financial fraud. This technology can also be used to swap voices in videos.  

An example for a Deepfake, where actress Amy Adams(original left) has been modified to have the face of Nicholas Cage (Deepfaked right)

Deepfakes have been grabbing public attention in many fields such as popular culture, politics and social media. 

As of 2019 , the internet featured,

• pornographic images of British and American female celebrities
• Argentine President Mauricio Marci's face was replaced with Adolf Hitler's
• Angela Marker's face replaced with Donald Trump;s
• Solo: A Star Wars Story used Deepfake technology to insert Harrison Ford's young face into Han Solo's face
• A Chinese Deepfake app allowed you to put your face into the scenes in the HBO's Game of Thrones
• Deepfake was used relentlessly in creating fake news

For you geeks out there, Deepfake uses a nueral network  called autoencoder. These consists of an encoder, which reduces an image to a lower dimensional latent space and a decoder which reconstructs the image from the latent representation.

Computer science associate professor Hao Li of University of Southern California says "genuine videos and deepfakes will be indistinguishable due to the rapid development of machine learning and artificial intelligence in computer graphics" and awareness should be spreaded about this technology.

So does this mean that all the pictures in your Facebook or Instagram can be easily used against you? Simple answer , YES. Seems like its time to keep your memories to yourself !