Look, I just woke up from a bourbon-soaked evening to find out ByteDance - you know, the folks who brought us that brain-melting TikTok app - have figured out how to make your photos act out movie scenes. Not in that cheap puppet way your nephew’s Snapchat filters do, but actually convincing enough to make you question reality. Which, let me tell you, I’m already doing plenty of this morning.
Remember when the scariest thing about photos was your ex-wife finding that shoebox under the bed? Those were simpler times. Now ByteDance has cooked up something called “X-Portrait 2” that can take any regular photo and make it perform like it’s auditioning for a goddamn Oscar. We’re talking full-on Jack Nicholson in The Shining level performances, but with YOUR face.
Back when I worked the night shift at the post office, the most advanced technology we had was a letter-sorting machine that broke down twice a shift. Now these bastards can make your LinkedIn profile picture recreate scenes from Face/Off. The irony of using that particular movie isn’t lost on me, by the way.
Here’s the kicker - they trained this AI monster using TikTok’s billion-user database. That’s right, all those dance videos and lip-sync disasters your kids have been uploading? They’ve been feeding the beast. It’s like they built a digital Frankenstein using the facial expressions of every teenager who ever thought they could nail a Billie Eilish impression.
The tech works differently than the old stuff. Instead of just connecting dots on your face like some digital connect-the-dots puzzle, it learns the whole face movement. It’s like the difference between watching a puppet show and actual human movement. Or the difference between my first and fifth bourbon - one’s obviously artificial, the other’s disturbingly natural.
ByteDance is spreading their research centers across Europe faster than I used to spread mail across sorting bins. They’re dumping $2.13 billion into Malaysia, cozying up to universities, all while TikTok’s getting shown the door in Canada and side-eyed by the US government.
You want to know the real nightmare? Hollywood’s probably salivating over this. Why pay millions for motion capture equipment when you can just snap a photo and let AI do the heavy lifting? As someone who’s watched automation sweep through every job I’ve ever had, I can tell you exactly how this plays out for the countless animators and motion capture artists: about as well as my attempt at sobriety last New Year’s.
The company’s keeping the code private, which is like locking up the liquor cabinet - it just makes the teenagers more creative about getting in. And trust me, if there’s one thing I learned from 12 years of night shifts, it’s that anything that can be misused, will be misused.
What keeps me up at night (besides the usual whiskey-induced insomnia) is how this fits into our increasingly digital world. We’re already living through our screens, and now we can’t even trust that the faces we see are really doing what we’re watching them do. It’s like we’re building a world where reality itself needs a fact-checker.
So here’s my advice, worth exactly what you paid for it: Keep your photos close, your face closer, and maybe start practicing your Jack Nicholson impression. At least then when someone makes your photo act out The Shining, you can say you did it better.
Until next time, this is Henry Chinaski, wondering if I can train an AI to handle my hangover instead of my face.