Of course, previous deepfake creators and their algorithms had the luxury of extensive interview footage featuring their subjects. So far, the deepfake genre has given us Barack Obama deriding Donald Trump, and legendary surrealist artist Salvador Dali (who died in 1989) snapping selfies with museum-goers, among others. Samsung’s collaboration with Leonardo da Vinci is the latest in a string of viral “deepfakes”: stunning, perhaps creepy videos in which famous faces are technologically manipulated to say and do all sorts of unlikely things. The facial movements of the “Mona Lisa” were derived from videos of three human subjects.

It was achieved purely by AI – specifically, a deep neural network trained via image banks to recognise and replicate the relationships between “facial landmarks” across a range of expressions. But this is no Hollywood CGI character created and controlled by human animators. Their video, viewed over one million times (and counting) on YouTube, shows the Mona Lisa realistically moving and talking. The mystery may have recently acquired new depth, thanks to digital animations created by Samsung’s AI researchers. For generations, scholars and art patrons have pondered the meaning of Mona Lisa’s smile.

Deepfake app mona lisa