AI Creates Fake Obama, Digitally Lip Syncs Him Talking About Stuff With Scary Level Of Accuracy

AI can truly transform the world, help unlock human potential. Or it can create a lot of mischief, as in the case of this story. Sorry Barack Obama.

Innovative research has found that an AI program can now generate highly realistic fake videos of former US President, Barack Obama, using existing audio and video clips of him available in the public doman, creating visuals that didn't exist before.

The realistic fake video above is a testimony to the researcher's work, where they've successfully managed to put words in Obama's mouth by converting audio sounds into highly realistic mouth movements, and patching it onto an existing video of Obama.

Sounds downright scary, right? Not to the researchers behind this technology.

The bright minds at the University of Washington argue that their groundbreaking work could help generate realistic digital models of anyone for future VR or AR applications.

Computer scientists working on the project funded by the likes of Facebook, Google, Intel and Samsung, revealed that they can now generate digital doppelg?ngers of anyone, just by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet. And their work suggests that in the not so distant future it will be relatively easy to create such models of anybody, especially with the hundreds of digital photos of everyone spread across social networks on the Internet.

"When you watch Skype or Google Hangouts, often the connection is stuttery and low-resolution and really unpleasant, but the audio is pretty good. So if you could use the audio to produce much higher-quality video, that would be terrific," according to Steve Seitz, co-author of the research and professor at the University of Washington.

The AI tool has an anti-abuse filter

Yes, the tool can create realistic fake videos that could fool the public and potentially start a war. But, according to the researcher, it can only put audio spoken by a person into their mouth. Which means you can't just take any piece of audio and make it look like Obama spoke about it. That's not possible.

What's more, the AI manipulation program can also be used as a verification tool. Videos fed into its system can be checked if they are real or have been tampered with, according to the researchers.