Show HN: Appear as anyone in video calls like zoom or Google meets

[michaelphi]

Hey everyone! i built this free tool that basically let you appear as literally anyone in video calls. it uses the latest tech in audio driven portrait animation. Would love to have some people test this out and let me know what you think! It's currently available on ubuntu systems. it works best with 4070 or 3080 gpus and up! basically anything with about 30TFLOPS on fp16. It runs totally on your device for 100% privacy too.

Just looking for people to test this out and let me know what they think! You can download it at https://www.phazr.ai/

[TaurenHunter]

The other day someone sent me a video where the candidate was lip syncing (very badly) the entire interview while someone spoke the answers outside the camera.

A tool like this would be very handy for him.

[arresin]

Could you post the link?

[pjmlp]

I think this will be a security mess, get misused for bullying with even worse outcomes, and hopefully there will be legislation that will tame these kind of applications, regardless of how technology cool it might be.

[thih9]

Or people will get used to it and over time stop trusting video that much; just like you wouldn’t trust this comment if I wrote that I am Tim Cook[1].

And most likely a bit of both, i.e. some extra laws and some extra awareness.

[1]: https://www.threads.net/@jazzdispensary/post/DFdXpC2SLqU

[6stringmerc]

Completely agree and the recent news about financial fraud perpetrated via video conferencing (as a component of the attack) validates your point.

On the other hand, if tools like these don’t get out into the wild and show the dark arts potential, then it remains a straw man argument against unchecked distribution and use cases.

Things are going to get ugly and it remains to be seen how much weight a check-box legal liability waiver will hold up.

[puppycodes]

It reminds me of that scene in Johnny Mnemonic where he's on the video call and the bad guy is using internet puppet fingers to impersonate someone. I think about this scene often and I feel like we are getting there. excited to try it when i have a gpu ;)

[3np]

Do you plan on making source code available? (Or: how can users verify that this is not malware?)

[michaelphi]

hmm not sure yet on the open source thing, but how do people normally verify downloadable software has no malware? I guess we could try to distribute it on like reputable distribution channels like the app store

[concerndc1tizen]

Not a critique, but:

Wouldn't using this software constitute a crime if using it to "appear as literally anyone"?

IIRC, the have been news stories in the EU about people receiving prison sentences for creating deepfakes, although maybe it was related to adult material. But impersonation and defamation is likely covered similarly. I'd assume that all it takes is for single viewer to believe it, to legally qualify as an act of impersonation.

[elitistphoenix]

FATAL:setuid_sandbox_host.cc(158)] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now. You need to make sure that /tmp/.mount_phazr-wg9XvA/chrome-sandbox is owned by root and has mode 4755. Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped)

[windsignaling]

I haven't installed this yet, but does it require camera access? i.e. does it "transform" your own image to the target image while maintaining facial expression, pose, etc.? Based on the animations, I'd assume it doesn't use the camera since there are techniques that can lipsync from audio.

[michaelphi]

no camera access needed! it directly generates the image via audio. this is more then just lip sync btw, it's animating the head of the image.

[mentalgear]

liveportrait or faster-liveportrait are the libraries probably.

[michaelphi]

similar but we directly audio to the image!

[yieldcrv]

if its fast enough, I’m very curious if this will get me broader acceptance as a different race in interviews with my same skillset and will report back

If it does work better, I’m sure people will just say the market picked up as opposed to validating my life experience, but as long as I’m collecting bigger paychecks believe whatever you want

[smcleod]

Hey, is the source open for this?

[terminatornet]

the best use case for AI seems to be snapchat filters. great stuff

[bglazer]

Since no one has asked, why build this? What’s the use case?

[lolinder]

I know the culture has changed dramatically in the last ten years, so I'll take this as a sincere question coming from someone who missed out:

Back in the old days, before 2014, people used to make computers do things just for fun. We'd write code because writing code is enjoyable, and hack on projects just to see if we could. If it made something that other people wanted to use that was a bonus, but hacking and experimenting was an end in itself. (The same, incidentally, went for writing blogs and for making YouTube videos).

In the last ten years most of us have lost sight of that in favor of everything needing to have an "audience" or a "use case"—if there's no path to monetization then we struggle to see the point. But some of us still build things just because we can, so from time to time you'll see a project like this that hearkens back to the old school hacker spirit and has no point besides to see if we could.

[52-6F-62]

Why?

[ashirviskas]

This seems great, but why Cuda only?

[michaelphi]

cuda is just standard for ml. amd port soon maybe

[Giorgi]

what about Ms Teams?

[michaelphi]

it works in any video app!

[Frederation]

I see only good things happening with this closed-source tech. /s