e427 — DeepBarbie Fakery | Games At Work dot Biz

35mm film negatives - the kind that required a great deal of skill to deepfake — Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Published 6 August 2023

Michael and Michael get together for a show full of intrigue and deepfakes – pictorially and in text. While Andy was not available to record this episode, he was a guest on the TechGrumps podcast recently, and you can check that out in the show notes below.

Staying with the Barbie theme, Michael and Michael begin this episode with a fantastic plastic representation of you called B-ai-rbie. Through this site, you can create a Barbie or Ken doll representation from your uploaded photograph. This example reminded the co hosts of a deepfake example that would create a portrait of an uploaded photo in the style of a famous artist. Links to that episode and MIT Tech Review story are included below.

Hiding in plain sight is one of the oldest camouflage tricks in nature, and the next story for this episode leverages this concept. To protect against deepfakes, tools like PhotoGuard and Glaze allow for an easy way for people to view visual content, but the images are rendered in a way to confuse AI models from using the images. Michael and Michael talk about the cat & mouse ways that these technologies will continue to evolve, and how encryption services like PGP could also be brought to bear.

Another example of hiding in plain sight is designed specifically for machine learning algorithms to pick up on the hidden text. The Schneier on Security article references a story from the Washington Post where job applicants are attempting to take advantage of the machine reading of their resumes by including additional keyword text in white font on a white background. So, instead of the human seeing something that the machine cannot, the human disguises text to be specifically read by the machine and not by a human.

It is an out of the ordinary thing to talk about the Unreal Engine when it comes to IRL automotive companies. For this episode, there is a story about how Ford is using the Unreal Engine to power their 2024 Mustang dashboard, allowing for the retro throwback dashboard of the Fox-body in the new vehicle along with further driver customizations.

Michael and Michael wrap up with stories about the upcoming second season of Loki and a link to 3D print your very own Futurama brain slug.

What do you think about protecting visual content via solutions like Glaze or PhotoGuard? If you could customize your car’s dashboard, what would you add or subtract? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!