Blog
ChatFace Offers Better Disentangled Neural Expression-Editing
A new system from Peking University improves on the state-of-the-art for neural face-editing, offering more faithful expression manipulation and more disentangled editing of facets such as hair and eye...
Faking Depth Occlusion for Better Augmented Reality
New research could improve the ability of augmented reality (AR) systems to convincingly insert synthetic objects into scenes, by studying the currently complex ways that they are matted and...
Bringing Temporal Coherence to Stable Diffusion with Flow Maps
A new project offers a way to cleanly transfer motion into synthesized video, promising a new level of realism and verisimilitude - if the code is ever actually released.
NVIDIA Offers Real-Time Neural People Through a NeRF and GAN Pipeline
A new collaboration between the University of California, Stanford, and NVIDIA has proposed a system capable of turning people into neural representations in real time, using Neural Radiance Fields...
Achieving More Realistic Deepfakes by Making the Image ‘Worse’
Deepfakes and AI-edited faces are often too 'perfect', which can help deepfake detection systems to identify them. But a new academic collaboration has devised a way to inject real-world...
Generating Temporally Coherent High Resolution Video With Stable Diffusion
A new text-to-video system backed by NVIDIA can create temporally consistent, high-res videos by injecting video knowledge into the static text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion - and can even let...
Adobe’s DreamBooth Clone Is 100X Faster and Obtains Better Results
Adobe has invented a way of injecting people's identities into Stable Diffusion as custom characters that out-competes former methods such as DreamBooth and Textual Inversion, while running at 100x...
The Challenge of Using AI to Change Facial Expressions
Across people, and particularly across cultures, facial expressions are not always accurate indicators of how we are feeling. How then can we create AI systems that can accurately change...
VIVE3D: Meta’s GAN-Based Deepfake and Video-Altering Framework
A new method uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to not only offer high quality facial editing, but even to convincingly change the orientation of the subject's face in respect...
The Small Faces That Vex AI Surveillance Systems
A new system offers better recognition of faces that are very small in a surveillance video or CCTV stream, which could increase the likelihood of more accurate and reliable...
GigaGAN: Stable Diffusion for Generative Adversarial Networks
A new text-to-image generative system based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) offers a challenge to latent diffusion systems such as Stable Diffusion. Trained on the same vast numbers of...
Detecting Deepfakes by Studying ‘Disconnected’ Facial Expressions
A smile affects many other parts of the face, and this tendency of expressions to be 'holistic', and to have a broader effect on a wide range of facial...
Using the Internet as a ‘Live’ Dataset for AI Training
Some of the most influential computer vision datasets are so old that many modern images - such as the latest iPhones - are completely absent. But curating and training...
Correcting ‘Selfie’-Based Facial Distortion, for Psychological and AI Development Purposes
New research offers a way to correct the extreme facial distortions that occur when taking hand-held selfies on smartphone cameras. Since AI is increasingly reliant on web-scraped data, such...
Obtaining Editable Neural Humans From Short Video Clips
Re-training Stable Diffusion models can allow users to compose scenes with accuracy, addressing one of the core weaknesses of latent diffusion models.
New System Offers Superior Layout Composition for Stable Diffusion
Re-training Stable Diffusion models can allow users to compose scenes with accuracy, addressing one of the core weaknesses of latent diffusion models.
NeRF Breaks Free From Being an ‘Animated Photo’
A new research project brings NeRF nearer to Stable Diffusion in terms of explorability and versatility.
Real-Time, Photorealistic Hands for Neural Environments
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute lead a new paper that offers personalized and high-quality live hand rendering in real time, aimed at VR/AR, teleconferencing, and other neurally-enhanced environments.
A Call to Legislate ‘Backdoors’ Into Stable Diffusion
A new MIT paper proposes not only a new adversarial method to prevent images being 'abused' by Stable Diffusion users, but a fairly drastic increase in the level of...
Preventing Stable Diffusion ‘Copyright Infringement’ by Poisoning The Source Data
A new paper proposes a method to protect the work of artists from being incorporated into Stable Diffusion, by using adversarial data perturbations to adversely affect generated results. Though...
Dataset Abuse Is Rife in Computer Vision – But the Solutions May Be Drastic
A new paper from researchers at Sony AI levels broad and scathing criticism at standards and practices in dataset re-use and abuse - but the cure might stop the...
New System Enables Tight Compositions and High-Res Output in Stable Diffusion
A new system from Spain offers Stable Diffusion users the chance to truly control their compositions, by orchestrating multiple models into a single image inside the latent space.
Stable Diffusion and Imagen Can Reproduce Training Data Almost Perfectly
New research indicates that Stable Diffusion, Google's Imagen, and other latent diffusion systems and GANs are capable of replicating training data almost exactly. The findings may have implications in...
AI is coming to Hollywood with Metaphysic
Metaphysic has been named the sole AI VFX provider for the highly-anticipated major motion picture Here, produced by Miramax, and directed by Robert Zemeckis. Starring Tom Hanks and Robin...
Image Synthesis Has an SEO Problem
Images uploaded to the internet are being scraped at scale for ingestion into AI datasets. But the captions associated with the images were written for SEO purposes, and not...
Creating Better Avatars with a Dual-Domain Approach
A new academic collaboration, including contributors from Microsoft, has developed an improved technique capable of fitting user-submitted images into a 'deepfake puppetry' workflow in only thirty seconds, with notably...
The ‘Cheap’ Decisions That Can Affect Image Synthesis
A new academic collaboration, including contributors from Microsoft, has developed an improved technique capable of fitting user-submitted images into a 'deepfake puppetry' workflow in only thirty seconds, with notably...
Temporally Coherent Human Video Deepfakes Via Diffusion
A new research collaboration between Poland and the UK may offer the first effective method to obtain a much-cherished 'holy grail' of deepfake image synthesis research – the ability...
Muse: Google’s Super-Fast Text-To-Image Model Abandons Latent Diffusion for Transformers
Google Research has revealed a new type of framework for text-to-image synthesis, based on the Transformers architecture, rather than latent diffusion.
Entanglement in Image Synthesis
In the field of image synthesis, entanglement is the enmeshing of data properties with data other properties, which can make it difficult or impossible to isolate a particular...
High-Quality Deepfake Puppetry in Thirty Seconds
A new academic collaboration, including contributors from Microsoft, has developed an improved technique capable of fitting user-submitted images into a 'deepfake puppetry' workflow in only thirty seconds, with notably...
Using Diffusion Models to Create Superior NeRF Avatars
A new research paper from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and Microsoft Research offers a rational and less resource-intensive way to generate 3D representations of...
Research Proposes ‘Moral’ Sanitization for Text-To-Image Systems Such as Stable Diffusion
New research from Korea and the United States has proposed an integrated method for preventing text-to-image systems such as Stable Diffusion from generating 'immoral' images – by manipulating the...
Creating State-of-the-Art NeRF Head Avatars in Minutes
If time were no object, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) might by now have made greater inroads into potential commercial implementations – particularly in the field of human avatars and...
InstructPix2Pix: Accurate, AI-Based Image-Editing With GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion
New research from the University of California at Berkeley improves notably on recent efforts to create AI-powered image-editing procedures – this time by combining the considerable calculative forces of...
Generative AI to transform Laboratory Testing
In recent years, hyperreal media has gained widespread attention for its ability to transform the entertainment industry, pop culture and visual effects. A new area of transformation is within...
Editing Out the Real World With ‘Diminished Reality’
In the 2014 Christmas special of the dystopian sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror, writer and series creator Charlie Brooker envisaged the possibility of cybernetic augmentations capable of 'blocking out'...
A New Social Image-Sharing System Deepfakes All People by Default
A new collaboration between Binghamton University and Intel offers a novel take on the problem of the unauthorized use of social media photos for facial recognition purposes, as well...
The Future of Using Public Images for AI Research
Besides their capacity to rip off the style of popular real world artists, the new breed of latent diffusion- based image synthesis systems promises a revolutionary ease-of-use not only...
NVIDIA’s Implicit Warping Is a Potentially Powerful Deepfake Technique
Over the past 10-20 years, and particularly in recent years, the computer vision research community has produced an abundance of frameworks capable of taking a single image and using...
Creating Authentic Human Motion Synthesis via Diffusion
New research from Tel Aviv University may prove capable of bringing authentic human motion to text-to-video synthesis, videogames, motion capture architectures in VFX pipelines, and also function as a...
Custom Styles in Stable Diffusion, Without Retraining or High Computing Resources
A researcher from Spain has developed a new method for users to generate their own styles in Stable Diffusion (or any other latent diffusion model that is publicly accessible)...
The Road to Realistic Full-Body Deepfakes
It's nearly five years since the advent of deepfakes released into the public realm the ability to alter people's facial identities; at first, in recorded video, and now even...
Stable Diffusion: Is Video Coming Soon?
For an excited public, many of whom consider diffusion-based image synthesis to be indistinguishable from magic, the open source release of Stable Diffusion seems certain to be quickly followed...
Vote for Metaphysic – AGT 22 Semi finals
We have reached the semis, which is fantastic. This is true. If you want Metaphysic to go on and reach the finals of AGT, you just need to vote for...
Are We Heading For ‘Deepfake CAPTCHA’ Challenges in Video and Voice Calls?
A new paper from Israel proposes the institution and ongoing development of a 'deepfake CAPTCHA' protocol, to challenge audio or video callers that may be using deepfake technologies to...
Detecting Deepfakes Through Personality Assessment
In the original, and the various cinematic incarnations of Jack Finney's 1954 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers, the fact that aliens are 'taking over' the earthly population is signaled...
To Uncover a Deepfake Video Call, Ask the Caller to Turn Sideways
There is an interesting vulnerability in video deepfakes that, to date, has been generally overlooked by the security research community, perhaps because 'live', real-time deepfakes in video calls have...
Defeating Deepfaked Video Calls by Monitoring Electrical Fluctuations
2022 has seen the emergence of 'live' deepfakes in videoconferencing as an acknowledged security threat. In June, the FBI issued a warning to businesses about the increasing use of...
The Future of Generative Adversarial Networks in Deepfakes
Excluding 'traditional' CGI methods, which date back to the 1970s, there are currently three mainstream AI-based approaches to creating synthetic human faces, only one of which has attained any...
How I Became The Fake Tom Cruise
Actor Miles Fisher had it all: talent, charm, and the face of a movie star. Problem was, it was a particular movie star. After years of resenting the resemblance,...
Deepfakes Go High-Res – But Can Deepfakers Handle It?
Towards the end of our new feature on the future of autoencoder-based deepfakes, we preview a new capability in FaceSwap, set for release this Saturday...
The Future of Autoencoder-Based Deepfakes
The way we refer to visual effects (VFX) work may be changing soon. For instance, at the time of writing, the relatively new technology of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)...
NeRF: An Eventual Successor for Deepfakes?
A recent study from Lancaster University found not only that most people cannot distinguish deepfake faces from real faces, but also that we tend to trust synthesized faces more....
Synthetic 101 – VR as an extension to normal life
This is another point on a road that is leading to VR experiences being as realistic as the real world. To be truly immersive, VR needs to be a...
Why the Metaverse must be hyperreal
The Metaverse is a nebulous concept. Questions abound as to what it will look like and what we will look like within it. We believe it has to be...
Metaphysic’s America’s Got Talent experience, with Chris Ume and Tom Graham
In this post, Chris Ume and Tom Graham give us a behind-the-scenes look into the audition process for America's Got Talent, the incredible reaction of the live audience and...
The Future Will Be Synthesised – E2: Deepfakes for disinformation
Metaphysic are pleased to announce the release of the next episode of the BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds documentary called “The Future Will Be Synthesised”, presented by our...
The Future Will Be Synthesised – E1: Deepfake Image Abuse
At Metaphysic we are very proud that our own Head of Policy and Partnerships, Henry Ajder, is presenting a BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds documentary called “The Future...
Building a safer synthetic media landscape: what needs to be done
Non-consensual image abuse is aimed almost entirely against women, remains the most prominent malicious uses of deepfakes and synthetic media.
The Metaverse & NFTs
What is the metaverse? Over the last six months, the metaverse has become one of the most talked-about and frequently misunderstood topics around. So what exactly is it? From...
An Introduction to Hyperreal Synthetic Media
At Metaphysic, our mission is to bring hyperreal synthetic media to the metaverse. Throughout history, artists have leveraged technology to push the boundaries of self-expression. From the cave paintings...
Building the metaverse with content created by AI
At Metaphysic, we are working towards a multi-layered metaverse filled with hyperreal content that people love.
Ethics and Synthetic Media
Metaphysic is committed to the ethical development of synthetic media technologies.
Introducing Metaphysic
Metaphysic builds software to help creators make incredible content with the help of artificial intelligence. Our mission is to expand the frontiers of human expression through the ethical application...
