You can now deepfake Elon Musk and others in your Zoom meetings

This open-source program lets users superimpose someone else’s face on theirs in real-time and in Zoom or Skype meetings.

Programmer Ali Aliev appears in a Zoom meeting as Elon Musk. (Ali Aliev/YouTube)

Zoom lets users add custom backgrounds to their meetings which make them look pretty fun. Now there's this program available which can be used to insert deepfakes in Zoom meetings. Users can now use deepfake filters to replace their faces with those of celebrities.

This is possible through Avatarify, which is a program that superimposes one person's face to another and in real-time during meetings, Motherboard reported. This code is available on Github and it can be used by anyone. It does require some work though as one would need to have some programming knowledge to use it. To actually get it running, one would need to run Avatarify, one streaming software and either Zoom or Skype.

Programmer Ali Aliev demonstrated this deepfake technique by using the code to superimpose Elon Musk's face onto his during a Zoom meeting. The morphed Elon Musk face is predictably fake but the eyes and head move around almost the same way as the real person. It would still be fun to prank Zoom meetings with the face of a celebrity or just anyone, really.

 

"The idea after Avatarify is availability and fun. Certainly it requires a powerful gaming PC to work smoothly, but we think optimization for laptops is just a matter of time. It just allows people to have some fun while being locked down at home," Motherboard quoted Aliev as saying.