this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Hi!

A bit of background/motivation: Sharing photos of protests can be an important part of the PR of political organizations. However, not everyone feels safe sharing their faces in connection to political organizing. That's why usually, faces are pixellated, or people wear face covering masks (which might be illegal on protests in some juristictions). Pixellated/hidden faces are quite ugly to normies, though, which can reduce the effectiveness of the publication.

So I had this idea: What if instead of pixelating the faces, I run some CV software on the image and all the faces get swapped with the faces of Hedy Lamarr, Diego Luna, or JC Denton. I remember that Snapchat could do live faceswaps with the selfie cam ten years ago, so some desktop software like that shouldn't be too hard to find in 2025, right? /j

Unfortunately, all the stuff I managed to find was some computer science projects in which you train some monster model with one hell of a dataset of each face you want to replace/emplace (which defeats the purpose of anonymizing political activists). Or some obnoxious AI startup which is waaaaay too busy sucking off Elon Musk and/or Sam Altman. I don't want to give my money/data to some doomed AI startup which ends up selling our likenesses to the NSA.

TL;DR: Is there some kind of desktop software which detects faces in an image and swaps them with another face? It's ok if there's only a framework (as long as it's not as bad as all the horrible OpenCV results you find in online tutorials).

Edit: I found something that I can work with

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

You can do something like this easily using stable diffusion and inpainting. Look into comfyUI or the AI horde if you don't have a GPU. You just mark a spot (a face) and ask the model to generate a face for you on that spot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I found a github repo which uses insightface to do the exact job I wanted. I needed to fix the code a bit, but I managed to faceswap the crew of Star Trek TNG on the faces of these protestors who I found on a image search engine:

Bonus - Diego Luna on some stock image:

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

GL🖖 on your AI ~~slop~~ project!🤭😉 It missed a few spots!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Where exactly? I couldn't find any missed faces.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

I think leaving hair and other features makes it a poor anonymizing tool. The faces may have been altered, but there's still information that can be used my motivated actors to correlate identities.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

apparel, keepsakes, skeletal structures, gait, stylometry/graphy, etc.

Even the SIM & IMEI/ESN owners in this picture can be precisely tracked by geolocation of the time the picture was taken, since we know the date&hour of when the protest took place.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

True. But depending on how much you pixellate that, those features are still commonlyseen when the faces are blurred.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Those are faceswapped. (Which shows how effective this is ;)

Check it with the original.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I did… Are you colorblind? I used purple to signify errors.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

But those faces were swapped. (E.g.: that's whoppie Goldberg to the far left)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You can also just literally edit in any mask you want on photos. E.g. Stephen St. [email protected] posted this candid of protestors on August 28th against the genocide in Gaza: The protest at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on August 28

And he could have protected them more than Laurence B. Alexander did hiring saboteurs, e.g.: Same image as above, but protecting students more

But always be mindful about of authoritarians hiring saboteurs at any protest. Lemmy thread discussing this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago

I was hoping for some more automated and clean looking solution. But thanks anyway.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What about just not taking pictures or video of faces?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you want to do some PR that appeals to people that aren't already on the left, then it's sometimes unavoidable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I remember not being on the left. I didn't need to see faces to feel ways about stuff.

Especially if both sides are fucking masked!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Especially if both sides are fucking masked!

I'm not talking about the current situation in the US. I'm talking about e.g. protest in Europe which aren't necessarily as heated up as the protests in LA right now. That might have not come across, sorry.

It's just more friendly to non-radicalised folks if the sharepic of the local union don't show up in balaclavas.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Still, i remember before i was quite so radical, and i don't think that would have been true for me?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's good for you, butedoesn't apply to everyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Okay, but if we're speaking for people who are presumably neither of us, then that's my best tool.

What did you think, when you first saw masked protestors?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm not really interested in this kind of discussion. I was asking for a tool, not for a discussion of wether or not to use that tool.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

FYI: In our instance, can reply with 'disengage' to end a discussion without conceding it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

But if you're saying it's effective, was it effective on you? What was your experience when you were the target audience you're talking about?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I already saidethat I am not interested in this discussion. Ask the people in my org. It always comes up when we're doing some solidarity photo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

So you just want to endanger people... So your job is easier?

Are you a serial killer who ritually murders OSHA inspectors in your free time? That seems like it would ve like 5% less evil

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

How do I want to "endanger people" if I want to hide the faces of people in my org? WTF is wrong with you?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Okay so that's people making videos of themselves on purpose to associate their identities? And nobody who didn't opt in? Then why does any measure of caution apply? What am i missing?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

What am i missing?

Basically every bit of context.

I asked about software to faceswap photos for when my org wants to publish a pic were everyone who is on it doesn't have to pixellate the faces, but rather faceswap the faces with other people (generated faces, historical figures, etc.).

I'd like to try that since everytime my org wants to take a photo (e.g. for showing international solidarity on social media), an argument arises of whether or not to pixellate the faces. Some people want their identities protected, other people think that pixellated faces damages public perception of the org.

How is that relating to anything you say?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

The point of blurring your face is to not attach it to your identity. It works or it doesn't. That's the part I'm missing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

The point of blurring your face is to not attach it to your identity.

So is faceswapping

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

But if your face is blurred, what's the value of being on camera at all?

And if you're face swapping, why not just 'based on a true story' the whole thing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago