Face upscaling is here, and it’s already better than it has any right to be. Using a site like
myheritage, or a mobile app like Remini, you can transform just a handful of pixels,
into a half-decent representation of the person it’s meant to be. And when the source image is
already half-decent, the result can be uncannily life-like. So good, in fact, that the only way I
can tell it’s been upscaled is by how the faces look better than everything else around them.
But I can hardly blame the app for that. But it isn’t just about upscaling, these days.
And the mobile app, Faceapp, proves to be a very capable face CHANGER.
Here I am, being me. And here I am, run through faceapp to make me smile. It has kept my lips,
but shifted them into a smile shape. And it’s wrinkled around the eyes,
and changed the shape and position of my nose and ears. It’s not PERFECT, but it’s so close
you wouldn’t have noticed that the image had been manipulated unless shown the before picture.
The biggest problem I can see with it is that the image compression used turns everything slightly
green. Not too much of a problem if we only change the image once… but in this video, I’ll be doing
it a lot more times than that in an attempt to find the limitations of this technology.
Slowly, over time, the smile gets bigger, the eyes more crushed,
and the image greener cos compression artifacts. This is as far as it gets before the app starts
to struggle. It then mistakes the area above my teeth as being a mouth,
and creates a NEW mouth above that one. Eventually the effect gets so extreme
that it can no longer find a face in the image. Before I start again,
let’s just make my hair longer …and then turn myself into a child. You’re welcome.
Another effect is to make me look older. And it gives me the full works- more blemishes
on the skin, a saggier neck, thinner, paler lips, smaller eyes and bigger ears.
It’s nice to know the app doesn’t think I’ll lose my hair. And I will say now,
this app is very cruel to anybody showing even the slightest hint of hair loss.
The second ‘aging’ layer still looks convincing, sagging my skin and making my eyes look really
sunken and floppy. And it has finally changed my hair, making it whispier,
and thinner in appearance. Beyond the second aging,
I become a sad husk of my former self, until it can no longer identify me as a person any more.
Let’s go back a few stages, give myself a beard, and then make me smile.
I got a hat for Christmas. And then I was asked
to take a picture of myself wearing it, so I took this flattering shot.
What if I grow my beard? It adds more hair, and for some reason makes it darker.
Apply the filter again and it grows longer and whisp-ier still.
But then we run into the limits. It refuses to extend beyond a certain length,
then simply becomes thicker and squarer in shape, then proceeds to swallow up my mouth,
then to eat away at my face until it no longer sees it as a face anymore. That’s horrifying.
I also got a shirt for Christmas. Here’s me, wearing it. And here’s me,
after too many mince pies. And… you get the drill by now.
What if I make my nose bigger?
And perhaps the most impressive transformation: what if I was a woman?
And then a man again? Then a woman? Slowly, my head gets bigger and more anime-like until
it no longer thinks I’m either gender. Or even a person. And I’m very green.
And last, I wanted to see if it was possible to return to how I was before.
So I made myself old. VERY old. Then a child! It didn’t really work- looks like a botched plastic
surgery. So I gave myself a sex change, tried to hide the artifacts with hair and glasses,
another sex change, then miraculously, giving myself MORE glasses seemed to fix everything!
Removing them again gave me a lazy eye, then I added a smile,
some aging, then made myself a child again, and then lastly some mild aging and a beard.
So not quite my former self, but not too bad. But it isn’t me any more.
At that point I felt that was about as good as I could hope for before I turned too green.
So yeah, great fun to mess about with, and free to use for these basic effects!
The app isn’t without controversy. I can’t speak for the company or its intentions, but training
neural networks on pre-existing data is going to open them up to all sorts of biases and issues,
and several of the transformations were seen as racist and were removed from the program.
And of course, you have to give the company permission to use your FACE,
and it’s all calculated on their servers probably somewhere in Russia. I did most of the stuff
in this video while bored on a train and I did notice it stopped working whenever I lost signal,
so it is in constant contact with the company’s servers.
Now personally, I don’t mind a company using my face, because it’s already plastered all
over the internet, and people who are going to misuse it are going to misuse it, and
because I can’t foresee all the horrible ways my information will be misused in the coming years.
But you might want to read through these terms of service to decide whether you want your face
being used. And maybe ask others before running their faces through this program. I checked out
the terms of service and it gets rated ‘D’, with ‘A’ being the best. But then… Reddit, Facebook,
Amazon and Youtube all get an ‘E’, so your rights have probably been severely compromised already.