In an age when AI-controlled digital news anchors exist, and digitally-rendered Instagram influencers have millions of adoring fans, it’s really no surprise that people are turning to so-called deepfake technology to enhance their looks and reach online stardom.

Asian social media has been buzzing about this young South Korean youtuber who goes by the moniker ‘RuiCovery’ ever since she outed herself as a “virtual human”. Apparently, that means that everything about her is real, except the face. Her hair, her body, her voice are all real, but the face is digitally rendered using deepfake technology. The revelation was shocking, especially to her fans, none of which had ever noticed anything out of the ordinary about the female YouTuber. The news once again brought deepfake into the spotlight and ignited a debate about the need to regulate it in order to prevent its use with malicious intent.

Photo: RuiCovery/Instagram

Rui, who made a YouTube video revealing her secret to her fans last month, agreed to talk more about her decision to use deepfake to hide her true appearance. She told South Korean news outlet KOCPC that she turned to the deep learning technology to improve her chances of making it on YouTube.

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. The result is pretty darn impressive, I have to say!

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.

The young virtual human wondered if her audience would have supported her as they do now if she had used her own appearance from the beginning. I reckon she doesn’t think they would, and knowing a bit about how the internet and YouTube work, I’d have to agree.

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. My guess is they are here already, they just haven’t outed themselves the way Rui has. These are interesting times, to be sure…

 

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.