Often used as an invisible trick to replace (or resurrect) a deceased actor, the “deepfake” technique, which allows faces to be manipulated in a highly realistic way in a video, has inspired many video creators in pop culture.
Deepfake is “an image-altering technique based on artificial intelligence to overlay existing audio and video data on other videos,” explains Wikipedia, allowing in particular “to change a person’s face in a video.” Thanks to fun and easy-to-learn mobile apps, this technique is no longer just for Hollywood studios.
Like post-sync, color grading, and other techniques used by filmmakers to “correct” their production, facial retouching (the technique of deepfake) is a means of compensating for the absence of an actor. In both cases, the deepfake is recent, or at least is supposed to be, and constitutes a trick.
Magazine "ctrlzmag” has made a selection of the most notable deepfake videos published on YouTube in recent years (ordered by upload date):
1. Obama Video (17/04/2018)
Former US President Barack Obama appears in the spring of 2018 in a video titled “You won’t believe what Obama says in this video!” (?) posted by Buzzfeed. The hoaxes are quickly exposed with the appearance of an Obama “impersonator” for this video that supposedly warns of the dangers that such deepfake videos could bring during the upcoming US election campaign, by misinforming viewers.
2. Physical and vocal changes in a cult film (10/12/2018)
Deepfake has also been used in film projects, where the physical appearance and speech of actors are changed, like movie characters. In 1997, director John Woo used it for his thriller Face-Off with an impossible plot: an FBI agent (played by John Travolta) sees the face of his sworn enemy, a comatose terrorist (Nicolas Cage), in order to gather information that could prevent an attack.
3. Jim Carrey as Jack Nicholson (07/08/2019)
The YouTube account called "Ctrl Shift" had received around 81 million views in 2017, with a video showing a scene from the movie "The Shining" with actor Jack Nicholson, who had been "dressed" with the face of another American actor, Jim Carry.
4. Imaginary round table with famous figures in cinema (11/11/2019)
Specialized media, especially those dedicated to cinema, love roundtable discussions with well-known figures to discuss a common topic. In November 2019, for the launch of Disney +, the website Collider brought together Robert Downey Jr., George Lucas, Tom Cruise, Ewan McGregor and Jeff Goldblum around the same table to discuss the future of cinema in the era of streaming platforms. In fact, this video was a deepfake, since their presence was not real, but was made through face swapping.
5. Double dose of Schwarzenegger (10/01/2020)
A YouTuber took the characters from the movie "Twins" to make a deepfake. In this video, it can be seen that Schwarzenegger's face was placed on another character played by actor DeVito.