special effects
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The Completely Unbelievable Story of the ‘Deepfake Cheer Mom’
When Bucks County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Matthew Weintraub stepped up to a podium on March 15, 2021, he set in motion a chain reaction of events that would capture the attention of millions and manifest a host of festering anxieties about the dangers of deepfake technology. Police from Bucks had recently arrested 50-year-old Raffaela Spone,…
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Netflix Found a Way to Make Removing Green Screens Easier by Turning Actors Bright Purple
Powerful software and talented visual effects artists are usually needed to convincingly pull off the effect where an actor filmed against a green screen is inserted into another shot. But researchers at Netflix say they have come up with a much easier, and potentially more accurate, green screen technique that takes advantage of how digital cameras…
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Now You Can Narrate Your Friend’s Lives Like Morgan Freeman With Augmented Voice
I wanted to see how alike I could be to HAL-9000 in my own, ragged rendition of the song Daisy Bell. It turns out, I actually sound better as the vague approximation of the demented artificial intelligence from 2001: A Space Odyssey than either HAL’s actor Douglas Rain or my normal, human voice.
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Deepfakes Maybe Not Quite the Political Apocalypse We Feared, MIT Researchers Find
Ever since we’ve seen deepfakes cropping up across porn, e-commerce, and literal bank robberies, there’s always been concern that this same tech could be used to interfere with future elections. Well, according to one new study, that might be tougher than we thought. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have put out a…