I love deepfakes. They let us watch our favorite celebrities get railed and put Nic Cage into actual good movies. They’re the best thing to happen to masturbation since that robot that eats pussy. And of course people are freaking out because they keep getting better, which is how computer learning algorithms work.
Freelance journalist Mikael Thalen posted this video to Twitter showing Steve Buscemi being imposed on Jennifer Lawrence, and it looks really good.
I've gone down a black hole of the latest DeepFakes and this mashup of Steve Buscemi and Jennifer Lawrence is a sight to behold pic.twitter.com/sWnU8SmAcz
— Mikael Thalen (@MikaelThalen) January 29, 2019
Cue the hysterics from media outlets:
“Jennifer Buscemi is the deepfake that should seriously frighten you” – The Daily Dot
“This Steve Buscemi/Jennifer Lawrence DeepFake Will Have You Fearing For The Future” – Junkee
“Doctored ‘deep fake’ videos posing threat to elections, security” – CNN
Give me a fucking break. I keep saying this, but this technology has been available forever. Here’s a behind-the-scenes doc of how LucasFilm did this to bring Peter Cushing into Star Wars: Rogue One.
And Marvel fans will remember how Captain America: Civil War used CGI to de-age Robert Downey, Jr. No, the part that scares these people is that poor people have access to this technology now. It was fine when it was just rich people, because these people consider the rich to be inherently trustworthy, which is why they want Silicon Valley tech billionaires to decide what acceptable speech is despite their horrible track record of doing things like deciding that “cisgender” and “learn to code” are hate speech. But who knows what could happen when this sort of technology is democratized! The horror of it all!
At the end of the day, all this technology is really going to do is give us better and more convincing porn of the women from Game of Thrones, and isn’t that a net good? It increases the amount of happiness in the world even more than having your bike stolen.