Alright, let’s talk about this “miedwiediew” thing. I messed around with this idea last week, and thought I’d share how it went.
So, I started by digging around, trying to figure out what “miedwiediew” even was. I stumbled across some stuff mentioning Dmitry Medvedev, you know, the Russian politician. There were whispers about him being more liberal back in the day and something between him and Putin, but honestly, I didn’t care for the political side of things.
My main goal was to try use his name in a silly project. I thought it would be funny to mess with facial recognition and deepfakes.
First thing I did was grab a bunch of pictures of Medvedev. I’m talking hundreds. Google Images was my best friend. I needed a good dataset for training. I even tried to find videos of him talking, giving speeches, just anything with his face moving.
Next up, I dove into the world of Python. I’m not a pro coder by any means, but I can usually hack my way through things. I used OpenCV for the facial detection stuff. That library is a lifesaver. I also messed around with some TensorFlow and Keras for the deepfake side. There’s a ton of tutorials online, so I wasn’t completely lost, but it still took some serious trial and error.
The biggest hurdle? Getting the training data right. The lighting, the angles, the quality of the images all mattered. If the data was garbage, the results were garbage. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the images, cropping them, adjusting the brightness, all that jazz. Tedious work, but it paid off.
I tried a basic face swap. I took my face and swapped it for Medvedev’s in a picture. It was creepy, not gonna lie. The edges were rough, the colors were off, but you could definitely tell who it was supposed to be. I felt like I was in some weird spy movie. Then I tried using his face on random meme pictures that I found, it was really funny.
I wanted to try more. So I tried using his face to replace the actors in that silly Nicolas Cage movie. It looked cursed. Like something out of a nightmare. I showed it to my friends, and they were both horrified and amused.
Lessons Learned:
- Deepfakes are harder than they look, but totally doable with some patience and a willingness to Google everything.
- Data is king. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.
- Medvedev’s face is surprisingly versatile for weird internet shenanigans.
Overall, it was a fun little experiment. Nothing groundbreaking, but I learned a lot, laughed a lot, and now I have a folder full of bizarre Medvedev-themed creations that I’ll probably never show to anyone outside my close circle. Maybe I’ll try Putin next time… just kidding (probably).
