Boston Globe. 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. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
There was a show on back in the early 80's hosted by James Coburn, which was called "The Darkroom" One of the episodes ahd a newscaster who was replaced with a CG version of himself. They had to keep the newscaster locked up so taht no one would ever know that he had either died, or otherwise changed. Happy story.
The point is, some twenty years later we are at the point where this is almost an option.
