In The Previous Post,

a gentleman was changing his appearance to that of a lady,

this post is similar, but not quiet what I expected, the lady above is a real life lady, South Korean youtuber who goes by the moniker ‘RuiCovery’ is a living breathing person, her hair, her body, her voice are all real, but and a big but, her face is digitally rendered using deepfake technology, in South Korea, there is a lot of emphasis on physical appearance. You could say that the same is true pretty much everywhere else, but the Asian country is on a whole other level. Its extremely high beauty standards have become a well known feature of Korean culture, and the booming cosmetics industry and pervasive plastic surgery services are a clear indicator of how important physical appearance is, RuiCovery didn’t feel that her appearance was up to South Korean standards, so instead of going under the knife and caking her face with makeup, she turned to cutting-edge technology powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence,  

Rui made a name for herself on YouTube by doing song covers and shooting the occasional vlog,

but she feels like the fake face created for her played a big part in her success as well. So even though, some of her fans have commented their disappointment at her revelation, claiming that they felt cheated by her, RuiCovery has no regrets, interestingly, RuiCovery’s impressively realistic appearance is the creation of a company called DOB Studio, which actually specializes in creating these deepfake personas for people wanting to leverage prefect looks to make it on social media, the service provided by DOB Studio is currently in closed beta, but when they are finally ready to serve the general public, we should expect to see more of these virtual humans on social media platforms, here is a thought, perhaps they are already here!

Update: DOB Studio CEO, Oh Je-wook claims that the technology developed by his company is different than what is commonly referred to as ‘deepfake’. While standard deepfake technology simply combines features of the actual person with those of someone else, DOB Studio’s system creates a whole new face from scratch, making it almost impossible to detect as fake by the human eye, what ever next? I made these 2 posts about people not being what they seem, as I am staggered by the technology that is out there, and I know nothing about, may be I should invent a new me to boost the readership!