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Comment by rthomas6 | Hacker News Reader

That's not a deepfake, it's a computer generated person. Deepfakes are when someone superimposes the face of someone onto a video of someone else.

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I was thinking the same thing, is there a word for a computer generated person? The whole article felt off to me because of what I interpreted as a misunderstanding of what a deepfake is

> is there a word for a computer generated person?

Maybe "infomorph"?

This should be the answer, even if there is a more accepted term already in use. The etymology is undeniable and it very effectively describes the concept in question without it possibly making references to any other adjacent concepts.

Also it reminds me of Animorphs!

Sadly, apparently, the name is taken over by another concept. For now.

I would suggest "compuppet"

That sounds so close to a Pokemon name... :)

The opposite will happen. I doubt the call for preciseness wins out.

Reuters and other media will fetch deepfake to mean more things, and it will become a category of related frauds.

I have to wonder when the meaning change occurred. It's hard to tell if they got it from an interview, or a misunderstanding introduced it into the article.

>A generative adversarial network is the name given to dueling computer programs that run through a process of trial and error, according to Hao Li, chief executive and cofounder of Pinscreen, a startup that builds AI avatars.

>One program, the generator, sequentially fires out millions of attempts at a face; the second program, the discriminator, tries to sniff out whether the first program’s face is a fake. If the discriminator can’t tell, Li said, a deepfake is produced.

https://graphics.reuters.com/CYBER-DEEPFAKE/ACTIVIST/nmovajg...

CGI?

An avatar; placeholder for identity.

It's a good one too! From our experience, an avatar is commonly used in relation to information warfare operations and can be similarly compared to sockpuppets, or deep socially engineered identities that have the will to skew with the public opinion.

Good luck convincing society of that before “deep fake” takes off as a term.

Media outlets are already using deepfake as a general term for photographic manipulation. You might recall that video of Joe Biden making lewd gestures on Trump's twitter. That was reported as being a deepfake but is in fact just using generic pinching technology.

To expand on the parent comment's point, this is most likely using some variant of StyleGan2 which has plenty of endpoints on the Internet to make it easy for someone to just download a face for free.

However, they all have this uncanny StyleGAN glare. And there are still artifacts. Quality's improving though. Scrubbing it of EXIF data doesn't really deter detection.

Go ahead, try posting some StyleGAN avatars to Facebook or something. Your account will get flagged immediately for doing so. There's already a robust amount of interest in "deepfake" detection, and there are methods to fingerprint or adversarial attacking your machine learning models with data poisoning so you can reasonably determine a dead giveaway. Kind of like putting a dye pack in your bills.

What is NOT helping, is how media outlets can drum up some cheap panic over the "end of truth" or insinuating how the barrier for disinformation campaigns is lowering. Both statements can be valid but I think we are teaching the wrong lesson having people told they can't trust anything rather than to establish what trust means to them in the first place.

While you're professionally right, the term stuck to the image and video manipulation aspects to simplify the terminology for consumers and readers for the last 24 months. And finding a cool name for the image frames that are generated through GAN's (generative adversarial networks) is a great idea...

Probably something as simple, and catchy, as deepfakes (which was ultimately linked to the initial user from github, if I remember correctly).

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