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For those who cannot dance to save their lives, the future is bright. No, there’s not an app for it – yet – but artificial intelligence offers a solution to turn people with two left feet into twinkletoes.

Using AI programs that can manipulate videos to create what are called “deep fakes”, four researchers from University of California in Berkeley, USA, have created a system that can read one person’s dance moves and copy them onto another. A video that explains how the program (still at a rudimentary stage) works had been posted by one of the researchers, Caroline Chan.

The source video, naturally, should be one of an adept dancer. A visual skeleton is created of the person in the source video to map the postures and poses for reference. Another set of algorithms is then used translate these dance moves to a lesser dancer.

With marvellous results. Eventually.