How to Deepfake Yourself

A deep-dive into deepfakes.

Category: Book design
Instructor: Brad Bartlett
Year: 2019

What’s a Deepfake?

A deepfake is an AI-generated video where one face is mapped onto another. The results often have an unreal quality. This is a book investigating deepfakes, computer vision, and related technologies.

This visual treatment comes from Vuforia’s image target engine. It is how a computer recognizes text as image, like a QR code.

Embodying Success

Graduating ArtCenter caused more self-reflection and anxiety than I expected. By embodying successful figures in design and technology, could I shortcut the whole job hunting process and propel my career?

Design authorship as deepfaking myself into Tim Cook, embodying his near-cult presentor status.

Design authorship as deepfaking myself into Elon Musk discussing a future in which simulations are indistinguishable from reality.

Selected Spreads

Since the author is known for talking about symbols, I ran Baudrillard’s famous “Simulation and Simulacra” through a machine learning-based emoji translator. I found the original text nearly impossible to read, so I think that it is an improvement.

DeepFaceLab generates a history of how it “trains” one face to match another — in this case, my own face and Tim Cook’s.

Can I use AI to write my book? GPT-2 is a “natural language text generation model” from OpenAI, considered so good it’s “too dangerous to release.” I used TalkToTransformer.com to generate my conclusions by posing a simple question: What’s a deepfake?