I’ll be honest – every word of that headline was like writing a press release for an evil overlord.

Am I being dramatic? Perhaps, but I don’t think we need any bigger and better deepfakes floating around, do you?

Since no one asked us, a team of researchers out of Samsung AI Center in Moscow, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, and Yandex Armenia have gone ahead and created MegaPortraits. 

This uber-realistic neural AI creates high-res deepfaked megapixel avatars from a single image, and the tech can be applied to modern images or classic art.

“…we advance the neural head avatar technology to the megapixel resolution while focusing on the particularly challenging task of cross-driving synthesis, i.e., when the appearance of the driving image is substantially different from the animated source image.”

Nerfies, a visual effects company for mobile phones, claims to have inspired the project.

“We present the first method capable of photorealistically constructing a non-rigidly deforming scene using photos/videos captured casually from mobile phones.”

Welcome to the future, folks!