For the past five years, many big movie companies such as Disney and Hollywood have been live action films with little to no actual location scenery. Instead, they are doing virtually everything digitally; and that has come to include people.
Disney was criticized heavily with Star Wars: Rogue One because Karey Fisher was playing the role of Princess Leah Skywalker-Solo. Why you might ask? Because Karey Fisher had died months earlier from a drug overdose, and she was just one of few actors that were in Rogue One that were absent from filming for some reason. This meant that every move and sound that came from the absent-yet-on-screen actors was faked, but this is the same technology that Deep Fake employs. Deep Fake changes parts of a person to do and say what the manipulator wishes, however there are a few tricks to finding these. Watch the minute facial details, these are the areas that Deep Fake struggles the most with.
Is it available to everyone? Yes, anyone can create a deep fake using a decent laptop and coding as it does not take much to do it; but for pristine results, you need to have lots of man power and high quality input images. This makes high visibility people like celebrities and world leaders vulnerable to manipulation, and has even been used in nonconsensual pornography, prompting some to advocate for it to be put on the list of revenge porn. But this does solve the problems of actors not being able to be in multiple films simultaneously. Meaning that with the widespread adoption of the technology, actors can stay forever young and be in endless films at the click of a button.
To end this post, let us tell Chris Umé thanks for bringing us deep fake, and making them popular with those viral deepfake Tom Cruise videos on TikTok. The visual and AI effects artist in Bangkok, India created deepfake videos as part of his company Metaphysic’s products.