If you're the sort of person who wonders what it would be like
to watch porn made by your favourite celebrities, then you're in luck. You might also consider maybe getting a life and talking to real people - we promise they don't bite.
Unless you ask them to. Where were we?
Oh, yeah, face-swapping porn. Someone with too much time on their hands and plentiful access to the internet has created an app which can superimpose faces - a la Face Swap - onto porn videos, allowing adult entertainment enthusiasts everywhere to imagine just what it would be like to watch Daisy Ridley/Leonardo DiCaprio/Anne Widdecombe going at it. Bloody hell, it makes the new sex robot brothel in the UK look tame. Check it out.
This has actually been around since December, and you'll not be surprised to hear that it is a Redditor who has developed this ground-breaking technology. They go by the name of "deepfakes", and he's been using a combination of a machine-learning algorithm, his computer and the huge amount of free porn out there on the internet to create his own mash-up skin flicks.
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Of course, when you release this information onto the internet you're guaranteed to get some copycats who are even better at it than you are, and lo and behold, exactly that has happened to deepfakes.
He created a subreddit to share his new developments and within a month, another Redditor - imaginatively named deepfakesapp - has created an app that does all the heavy lifting for you.
"I think the current version of the app is a good start, but I hope to streamline it even more in the coming days and weeks," deepfakesapp told VICE's Motherboard.
"Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button."
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According to another Redditor, the process of creating such a video takes "Around 5ish hours - decent for what it is."
Of course, the potential implications of this in the real, non-masturbation-driven world are huge. If it is possible to take the face of one person and seamlessly superimpose it onto another, then plenty of people could be fooled pretty quickly.
All that is required to create these videos is a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) - which everyone who plays top spec video games already has (and who knew that there would be a crossover between gamers and porn enthusiasts?) - and CUDA support, a relatively easily accessible and useable parallel computing platform.
The potential for this tech to be used of shady antics is huge.
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Deborah Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Applied Ethics at the University of Virginia's school of engineering, told VICE: "You could argue that what's new is the degree to which it can be done, or the believability, we're getting to the point where we can't distinguish what's real-but then, we didn't before. What is new is the fact that it's now available to everybody, or will be... It's destabilizing. The whole business of trust and reliability is undermined by this stuff."
Featured Image Credit: Daisy Ridley on a performer's body using FakeApp