Its…good. I do wonder if I would have been fooled if I hadn’t known that it was a deepfake and hadn’t watched both actors literal dozens of times in the saga.
As it is, in R1 (which wasn’t a deepfake) Tarkin looked off. Sam Jackson was mostly seamless in Captain Marvel. While De Niro was obviously de-aged in Irishman (he retained the old man gait)
But he looked less “off” in Rogue One than he did in Star Wars. Peter Cushing is just a freaky-looking dude.
Eh, people always worry about this, but it’s nothing new. In the era before video, someone would tell you that they saw something, and you just had to judge how trustworthy they were. And you had to trust not only their honesty, but also how reliable their powers of observation and their memory were, because even an honest witness could be honestly mistaken. And yet, we as a society were able to function, even with all of that uncertainty.
Now, in the era of deepfake video, when someone tells you they saw something, you still have to decide whether to trust their honesty. But if you do trust that they’re honest, then you no longer have to worry about their other limitations. We’re a lot better off than we were before.
And that’s the worst-case scenario. Most likely, just as technology will make it easier to make the fakes, technology will also make it easier to detect them, as well. You and I can look at a clip like this and not be able to tell the difference, but maybe an AI can tell even when we can’t. And likely, for contexts where it matters (like security cameras, as opposed to entertainment), there will be additional measures like cryptographic signatures to authenticate video, that can’t be faked.
One of the few times I am glad George Lucas sold the franchise. He would have done.
Actually, he would have found a picture of Carrie Fisher at 10 and used it to make a deepfake character and not had an actress at all.
No, he would have started with a picture of Carrie Fisher at 50, used de-aging software to subtract 40 years, and then used that as the basis for the deepfake. And then claim that it was completely indistinguishable from the real 10-year-old Carrie Fisher, even after genuine photos surface that show that she looked completely different, and then blamed the differences on viewers not having their TVs adjusted correctly.
It’s absolutely new. You learned not to trust pictures, but you would trust video and audio most of the time. We’re entering an era where nothing can be trusted. There will be no sense that anything is real and we will be absolutely bombarded with fakes. Highly motivated people today already believe obvious fakes, but sophisticated fakes will do this to more and more people.
We’re going to have perfectly faked video and audio from important public figures, it will be dressed up as a leak, look legitimate, and short of, perhaps, very sophisticated tools, it will be enormously difficult for us to know, even if we’re savvy, whether it’s real or not. AIs are already doing a fantastic job of radicalizing us, but they’re only going to get better. We’re going to get systems that can pass a casual version of the turing test posting targeted disinformation everywhere, 24/7. It will be hard for smart, savvy, skeptical people to know what’s real - the rest of the dumb dumbs out there have no chance.
Photoshop was a gentle warmup compared to our machine learning/AI/deepfake future and sophisticated disinformation campaigns. We think we’re living in a horrific post-fact dystopia - and we are - but we’re just at the early stages. It’s going to get more and more sophisticated and effective. We look at shock at the absolute insanity of today - with full justification - but in 10 years we’re going to be yearn for the happier, gentler times when at least you could figure out what was real if you were motivated.
For the vast majority of human history, we haven’t been able to trust video, for the simple reason that video didn’t exist. I don’t see how untrustworthy video is any worse than no video.
For me, it merely underlines that EM was a good casting choice (in terms of face/bone structure at least) as a plauslble younger version of AG’s’ older Obi Wan.
