WATCH This Freaky Deepfake Video Of Obama Trashing Trump
Source: https://goo.gl/BGYGJH
Barack Obama has finally ditched the slick politicking and come right out and said what he really thinks about Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and who the real hero of “Black Panther” is — and it’s exactly what you thought he’d say. Except that it’s a “deepfake” by comedian Jordan Peele who wants you to know that we live in dangerous times, where sinister, tech-savvy figures can create fake news with a few apps and a couple of days of processing.
Here’s the freaky and kind of funny deepfake video by Peele, in which Obama calls Trump a “total and complete dipsh**,” smacks Carson, and announces that “Killmonger was right” about the need for black people to rise up and slay their oppressors, or something (warning: language):
The video was published by BuzzFeed, which provides some more information on the new, increasingly easy face- and voice-swapping technology that will further erode people’s trust in what they see online:
Technology to trick our eyes and ears is advancing rapidly. Teams in Germany are working on Face2Face, the type of face- and voice-swapping technology used to create the video above. Software giant Adobe is creating a “Photoshop for audio” that makes it easy to edit and manipulate what someone has said, as is a Montreal startup called Lyrebird. After you’ve selectively edited someone’s words, you could take that audio and use tech developed at the University of Washington to generate a video of the very same person speaking those words, just to make it fully convincing.
Peele used FakeApp, a free tool that people have used to retroactively make Nic Cage the star of “Indiana Jones” and make celebrities the stars of porn videos. BuzzFeed describes the process:
Part of the process for creating this video involved taking an original video of Barack Obama and pasting Jordan Peele’s mouth into it. It looked really bad and clumsy at first. But things got remarkably better the longer FakeApp was left to process a more believable amalgamation of Obama’s head and Peele’s mouth. That took roughly 56 hours and was overseen by a video effects professional.
So will deepfakes result in the “infocalypse” BuzzFeed and Peele are sounding the alarm about? Will the Russians fool large swaths of stupid Americans with fake videos of our political leaders saying outrageous stuff to direct our politics? Or, worse yet, will Nic Cage eventually star in every formerly good film ever made? Stay tuned and stay skeptical.