How to use AI to make you look younger
Technology
Tom Hanks defends using the technology in his latest film
(Web Desk) - From a daily skincare routine to Botox and face lifts, some people will do almost anything to turn back the hands of time.
Now, some actors are going one step further and using a controversial technology to digitally 'de-age' their appearance.
In his latest film, Tom Hanks, 68, and his Forrest Gump co-star Robin Wright, 58, use AI to play the same couple at different stages in their lives.
Hanks says: 'It’s a great tool, because the super computing means you do not have to wait for post-production to do the purely technical visual view of it.'
There has been growing concern over the use of AI in cinema, with many actors worrying that the technology will force humans out of the film industry.
However, both Hanks and Wright have defended the use of AI, saying it removes the need to cast younger actors.
If you want to de-age your photos, you'll be happy to hear that you don't need a Hollywood budget to give the technology a try.
Here's how you can use AI to make you look younger.
Digital de-ageing is a relatively new VFX technique which can make actors appear significantly younger than they are.
In post-production, editors apply touch-ups or computer-generated overlays to an actor's face like a digital mask.
In the past, editors would make a 3D model of the actor's face from detailed scans and manually apply a digital 'facelift' - removing chins, wrinkles, and reducing the nose and ears.
That 3D model would then be mapped to the actor's face by a series of dots drawn in a grid just like the white balls you see in motion-capture performances.
That allows the CGI model to move realistically in time with the real actors' faces.
However, with the advent of powerful AI models, there is no longer a need for a VFX artist to manually create the younger model.
Instead, an AI is trained on images of the actors so that it can automatically generate the younger image, mapping the mask to tiny details on the actors' faces for a more realistic performance.
Ms Wright told Radio Times: 'They basically trawl the internet and get interviews that we did when we were 19, 20, 21 years of age. They literally take that data and put it into your face.'
A big difference to older techniques is that this process can be done in almost real-time rather than over weeks and months of editing.
Hanks says that it would take the computer 'a nanosecond' to do what would have previously taken six months.
'So we shot the scenes at Pinewood and we could look at them immediately,' he said.
Although you won't have access to the powerful and expensive tools used by film studios, there are some cheap options out there.
The main difference between these options and the ones used by the stars is that they aren't trained on your specific images.
