Appropriating a person’s physical data to generate programmed videos arbitrarily making use of it is technically demonstrable, using biometry and neural networks. Although outputs are still raw, the ethical concerns can arise rapidly, especially after elaborating proper manipulations. Quasimondo (Mario Klingemann), in his Alternative Face has excellently proved this approach. He has used the face of French singer Françoise Hardy, and trained a generative adversarial network to generate videos of her face using a set of biometric markers and several of her video clips. The resulting model has become perfectly controllable and after Conway’s markers has been mapped onto Hardy’s face, it has been used to produce a video where the singer seems to speak in the infamous Kellyanne Conway’s’ “alternative facts” interview. The uneasiness of confronting this use of identity visual data is just showing the way these kind of manipulations are going to be used in the near future.

 

Alternative Face v1.1