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Welcome to Ban Covert Modeling! wiki - A wiki about why and how covert modeling of the human appearance and of the naked human voice should be outlawed urgently.

How to protect yourself from covert modeling | Digital look-alikes | Digital sound-alikes | Advice for judiciaries | Current laws and their application | Law proposals to ban covert modeling | Biblical explanation - The Book of Revelations | Atheist explanation | Glossary | About this wiki

Covert what?!!??!

Image 1: Separating specular and diffuse reflected light

(a) Normal image in dot lighting

(b) Image of the diffuse reflection which is caught by placing a vertical polarizer in front of the light source and a horizontal in the front the camera

(c) Image of the highlight specular reflection which is caught by placing both polarizers vertically

(d) Subtraction of c from b, which yields the specular component

Images are scaled to seem to be the same luminosity.

Original image by Debevec et al. – Copyright ACM 2000 – https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=311779.344855 – Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

Image 2 - Sculpting a morphable model to one single picture (low resolution rip)


(1) Sculpting a morphable model to one single picture

(2) Produces 3D approximation

(4) Texture capture

(3) The 3D model is rendered back to the image with weight gain

(5) With weight loss

(6) Looking annoyed

(7) Forced to smile

Image 2 by Blanz and Vettel – Copyright ACM 1999 – https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm? doid=311535.311556 – Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

Since the early 00's it has become (nearly) impossible to determine in still or moving pictures what is an image of a human, imaged with a (movie) camera and what on the other hand is a simulation of an image of a human imaged with a simulation of a camera. When there is no camera and the target being imaged with a simulation looks deceptively like some real human, dead or living, it is a digital look-alike.

Now in the 2010's the equivalent thing is happening to our voices i.e. they can be stolen to some extent with the 2016 prototypes like w:Adobe Inc.'s w:Adobe Voco and w:Google's w:DeepMind w:WaveNet and made to say anything. When it is not possible to determine with human testing or testing with technological means what is a recording of some living or dead person's real voice and what is a simulation it is a digital sound-alike.

Therefore it is high time to act and to criminalize both covert modeling of the human appearance and the covert modeling of the naked human voice!

Threats posed by covert modeling

Covert modeling poses growing threats to

1. The right to be the only one that looks like me (compromised by digital look-alikes)
2. The right to be the only one able to make recordings that sound like me (compromised by digital sound-alikes)

And these developments have various severe effects on the right to privacy, provability by audio and video evidence and deniability.

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