A new AI can make anybody look like a dance superstar by giving them the moves of a professional dancer.
The creepy robot uses the movements of top dancers captured from a video to animate your body in a creepy ‘DeepFake’-style video.
Experts behind the technology said it allows amateurs to ‘twirl like ballerinas’, or perfectly imitate their favourite pop stars.
A new AI can make anybody look like a dance superstar by giving them the moves of a professional dancer. The creepy robot uses the movements of top dancers (left) captured from a video to animate your body (right images) in a creepy ‘DeepFake’-style video
The AI, developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, first copies the moves of a professional dancer from a source video.
It then generates a new video of a completely different person’s body performing those moves.
The films it generates feature occasional blurs and the odd missing body part, but reveal the potential for the technology to one day produce convincing video.
‘With our framework, we create a variety of videos, enabling untrained amateurs to spin and twirl like ballerinas, perform martial arts kicks or dance as vibrantly as pop stars,’ researchers wrote in their paper.
The system learns to transfer dance moves using deep learning, a type of machine intelligence that pits several AIs against one another.
One AI creates a virtual skeleton on which to map poses, while two more challenge one another to create more realistic video.
One AI, a generator, produces a video, while a discriminator tries to determine if the image is real or fake, sending the clip back to the first AI if it isn’t realistic enough.
Over thousands of calculations the two AIs eventually produce a realistic video in which the moves of one subject are mapped onto the frame of another.
The team had to capture a short video of the non-dancer twisting around to give the AI sample footage with which to build the fake clip.
‘Given a video of a source person and another of a target person, our goal is to generate a new video of the target person enacting the same motions as the source,’ researchers wrote.
The research is the latest step forward in creating realistic video that places people in situations that they were never really in.
Experts behind the technology said it allows amateurs to ‘twirl like ballerinas’, or perfectly imitate their favourite pop stars. Pictured are two fake videos (centre and right) thar made amateurs appear as if they were dancing like Bruno Mars (top left)
So-called DeepFake technology has already been used to create fabricated clips that transfers people’s faces and mouths to a video of someone saying or doing things they never did.
Last year internet users began utilising the technology to create fake videos in which the faces of celebrities were pasted onto porn stars.
PornHub, Reddit and Twitter all banned AI-generated porn from being posted on their platforms in February.
They said the content falls under the guidelines of non-consensual porn, which violates site-wide policies.