People who could not dance to save their lives may finally get the chance to see themselves busting out moves like a professional, with the help of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence currently has a wide range of applications, including seeing through walls, predicting the side effects of prescription drugs, and beating humans at video games. Making people look like pro dancers is apparently being added to that list.
AI Will Help Make You Look Like A Pro Dancer
A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley has developed a deep learning system that is capable of taking the dance moves from great dancers and transferring them to a person who is not as good.
Of course, this does not involve actually transferring the skills from person to person like in science fiction. An algorithm creates a virtual skeleton from the videos of a good dancer, the source, and the not-so-good dancer, the target. Both the source and the target will need a lot of footage, for about 20 minutes at 120 frames per second, for a better quality of the transfer. The transfer then happens, with the neutral network combining the video of the target with the movements of the source.
There are still some limitations to the artificial intelligence program created by UC Berkeley researchers though. For example, the target subject should not be wearing loose fabrics, as the neural network could not accurately model people with such clothes. The resulting video is also not yet perfect, as a closer look will reveal some distortions, especially when it comes to replicating more complicated moves.
Nevertheless, the results already look amazing. Wannabe dancers should hope that the technology is soon made to a smartphone app.
Deepfakes Controversy
The UC Berkeley research brings to mind deepfakes, which is a face-swapping video technology that transfers source images and videos onto target images and videos. Unfortunately, the technology was abused, with the artificial intelligence used to create fake celebrity pornography. Such content was eventually banned from PornHub, with Reddit soon following in banning deepfakes communities.
The concerns regarding deepfakes technology, however, extend beyond making celebs look like they are doing porn. If there is enough footage of a person, he or she can be made to look like they are doing anything on video, including saying malicious things and performing criminal activities.
With such technology out in the open, internet users will need to be more critical of the videos that they watch online, to make sure whether they are real or not.
