AI-altered video makes it look like you can dance

There’s still work to be done before it’s truly ready. You’ll notice the occasional jittering, blurry details and even missing body pieces. The scientists sometimes needed subjects to move in specific ways to help the AI create the indented effect. Moreover, the dances you see here are relatively easy to translate given the standing position and obvious movements. It might be harder to replicate breakdancing or other routines where you might not even be right-side up, let alone standing.

The potential uses are quite clear, though, and there are some potential ethical concerns. It’d certainly be useful for parodies, or pure fun. You could make your straight-laced coworker do the electro shuffle, or show your kids what they’d look like doing a Fortnite dance. However, we’ve also seen what happened with deepfakes. What was once a clever face-swapping technology quickly fell prone to abuse for porn. It’s all too easy to see this used to doctor videos for personal attacks or propaganda — say, making a politician deliver a rude gesture. Just as it’s no longer certain that a talking head in a video is authentic, you might not have guarantees that a person’s body movements are real.