The ‘Anonymizer’ Tool Helps Generate Deepfakes of Your Face

• A free to use AI-powered tool can help you generate a large number of deepfake faces of yourself.
• The point of that is to avoid facial system recognition based on the scraping of public data.
• The tool is really impressive, but it does come with abuse and even privacy risks.

The problem of having companies scrape publicly available data from social media platforms and other open data repositories is undeniable. ‘Clearview AI’ is a classic example of that, and unfortunately, it is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are literally thousands of facial recognition tools out there that populate their data pools by collecting people’s photos on social media, training their machine learning algorithms, and making connections between faces and identities. If that sounds scary, you may use an artistic avatar or something that has nothing to do with your face. Alternatively, you can use ‘Anonymizer.’

This is an AI-powered deepfake generator that can create images that are close to resembling your facial characteristics, but not quite. The idea is that you can still use a lifelike image that is not stolen from another person, doesn’t violate any copyrights, and will make your profile look realistic to other users. All you need to do is to upload a clear photo of your face, and two separate generative adversarial networks will spew out 20 deepfakes.

As you can deduce from the above image, the results aren’t exactly doppelganger-level stuff, and some don’t appear as realistic as others. Most of them are perfectly usable, though, and considering that the ‘Anonymizer’ is free for personal use (commercial needs license), it is an amazing tool that we have no complaint about.

That is except maybe for one thing. You have to upload your face on the site for the tool to generate deepfakes. Of course, the project states that no data is saved, but we have heard that claim before. Twice. While we can’t dispute that claim, we would prefer a generator that uses parameters instead of actual images.

As for using the generated faces to impersonate other persons or to conduct illegal activity, this is prohibited by the terms of use, but we guess that it will be hard to trace back such cases since there’s no watermark in the deepfake images, nor the requirement to create an account on the platform.

Anyone can just hop there and generate fake faces of someone else, as long as they have an image of them looking forward. Again, since the generated faces aren’t really that close to the original, impersonating someone would be hard unless the malicious person digs in many hundreds of iterations.