Snapchat has acquired Ukraine-based AI Factory, which is an image and video recognition analysis and processing technology startup company.
The social media giant paid $166 million USD (approximately $215 million CAD) to acquire the deepfakes startup, and will use the tech to power its Cameos feature. The new feature lets users edit their own faces into videos and then share them.
AI Factory was founded by Victor Shaburov, who previously founded Looksery, which is a facial-recognition startup that Snapchat acquired in 2015.
Deepfakes have become increasingly popular and are also making it harder to detect manipulated content. It is now a trend for consumer apps to tap into the technology to create fun features to garner users.
TikTok recently revealed that it has secretly built a deepfake tool as well. It wouldn’t be surprising if more social media networks decide to create their own deepfake tools in the near future.
Source: TechCrunch
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