Alright fam, I have some experience with image forensics and decided to take a look at what is going on with the face because this is the most sophisticated face manipulation I've ever seen (without exaggeration).
Open this in large to read the observations if you are interested
It's really hard to pinpoint what exactly is going on but I'm relatively confident that the whole face is being swapped with a different real face.
It's definitely not latent diffusion like the currently popular approaches (Stable Diffusion, Midjourney etc.). This doesn't leave a whole lot of options, most notably:
- real face of different person is being overlaid, masked and then slightly liquified? (imo the most likely)
- some sort of GAN output is reused with initial manual edits (general adversarial network, different type of AI approach that is more narrowed down on a single concept but can achieve more realistic results than diffusion)
The most interesting thing I noticed is that the left eye liquification artefact I noticed here can be found in a lot of other images on Instagram too which suggests it's the same image (or atleast the eye area) being used as an overlay and makes the use of AI tools on an individual basis less likely
So in other words, this isn't just a filter like from an Android app but professional face replacement with the same resource that
could be a real person
