Okay, here’s my attempt at a blog post, mimicking the style and tone you described.
My Nina Agdal Deepfake Adventure: A Hands-On (and Messy) Journey
Alright, so I decided to dive into the whole deepfake thing. Why? Curiosity, mostly. And, well, Nina Agdal is… you know. Anyway, I figured I’d try to create a deepfake of her. Here’s how it went down.
First, I spent a solid afternoon just grabbing images and videos. Scoured the internet. Google Images was my best friend. I needed a ton of footage – different angles, lighting, expressions, the whole shebang. The more data, the better, right? It was kinda creepy digging through so much stuff, but hey, gotta commit.
Then came the “fun” part: setting up the software. I went with DeepFaceLab. It’s free, and I’d heard good things (and bad things, mostly about how complicated it is). Getting it installed on my rig was a pain. Had to wrestle with Python versions, CUDA drivers, the usual tech headaches. Seriously, it took me like half a day just to get the thing running.
Next up was the training. DeepFaceLab needs to “learn” what Nina Agdal looks like. This involves feeding it all those images and letting it chug away for hours, days even. My GPU was screaming the whole time. I started with like 20,000 iterations (that’s what the tutorial said). Looked promising at first, but the results were… weird. Kinda blurry, the skin tone was off, and it just didn’t look right.
So, I cranked up the training. Let it run for a full week while I did other stuff. Came back, and it was… better, but still not great. The eyes were always a problem. They looked dead, lifeless. I tried tweaking the settings, messing with the masks, nothing seemed to fix it completely.
After that week-long session, I decided to try swapping Nina’s face onto some random video I found. A short clip of someone talking. The merging process was surprisingly quick. But when I watched the result… yikes. It was unsettling. The mouth movements were off, the lighting flickered, and it just looked… fake. Obviously.
I messed around with post-processing, tried to smooth things out, correct the colors. Made some minor improvements, but honestly, it was still pretty rough. Definitely not ready for prime time.
So, what did I learn? Deepfakes are harder than they look. It takes a lot of time, a decent computer, and a whole lot of patience. And even then, the results might be… questionable. It’s definitely not something you can just whip up in an afternoon. Plus, the whole experience was kinda ethically icky. I’m not sure I’ll be doing that again anytime soon. Maybe I’ll stick to simpler projects from now on. But hey, at least I can say I tried it.
