Photoshop was a revolutionary piece of software. No longer did perverts simply have to imagine their favourite movie stars naked, they were given the means to digitally paste their heads onto the bodies of porn stars to fulfil their sordid fantasies. Not only that, its given birth to some of the dankest memes going around today.
Adobe‘s Zeyu Jin understands this, which is why he began the Adobe VoCo demo with the sentence, “you guys have been making weird stuff online.” He’s right, the internet is a cesspool of strange and frightening content and with VoCo, it’s about to get way weirder.
Hosted by comedian Jordan Peele and Adobe’s Community Engagement Manager, Kim Chambers, the Adobe Max Creativity Conference gave a sneak peak of the terrifying possibilities of what is essentially the Photoshop of audio. By listening to 20 minutes of speech, the program can synthesise that persons voice near flawlessly.
During the demo, Jin took a short clip from an interview with Jordan’s comedic partner, Keegan-Michael Key, and manipulated it by cutting and pasting words and to the crowds disbelief, typing in words that Key had not said during the short clip.
The result was simultaneously hilarious and devastatingly scary – The clip went from “I jumped on the bed and I uh, kissed my dog and my wife, in that order”, to “And I kissed Jordan, and my dogs” with a frightening haste. Peele appropriately threw his hands in the air and accused Jin of being a witch. We don’t blame him.
Unfazed, Jin then manipulates the phrase again, making it “And uh, I kissed Jordan 3 times”.
Of course, the biggest concern with this kind of technology is the potential forgery that may ensue. It’s a scary prospect, but Jin is adamant that as the software is developed, the team is working very hard to implement failsafes and detection watermarks to keep evil assholes from using your voice for terrible things.
You can suss the clip of the presentation below:
Source: Adobe.
Photo: Adobe.
