Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) breakthrough in digital video editing.

In one demonstration, the researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera, and then reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking entirely new sentences, and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese, a language she does not speak. The results were enough to fool viewers consistently, the researchers report.

«This is really groundbreaking work,» said Demetri Terzopoulos, a leading specialist in facial animation who is a professor of computer science and mathematics at New York University. But, «we are on a collision course with ethics. If you can make people say things they didn't say, then potentially all hell breaks loose.»

MIT's Ezzat said that he would like to develop a more complex model that would teach the computer to simulate basic emotions.

There is also a quicktime video of the technique in action. [Boston Globe via John Robb's Radio Weblog]

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