Videos that sneak into familiar people in old movies, series or interviews are increasingly common. This exchange of identities, achieved through the technique of deepfake , has now placed two actors of the Marvel universe in a film classic as Back to the Future (1985).
YouTube user EZRyderX47 shared on Friday his profile a montage in which Tom Holland (Spiderman) and Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) traveled 35 years ago. While the first takes over from Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, the second keeps the role that Christopher Lloyd played in the original film, that of Dr. Emmet Brown, although the voices are the original ones. The video exceeds one million views in its first 48 hours of publication. That Holland has a certain physical resemblance to Fox helps make the result so surprising.
In the modified scene, both characters have traveled to the 50s, just before Marty was born. They discuss in the institute on how to reunite Marty's parents, since he has inadvertently fallen in love with his own mother and now fears that, if they don't end up together, he will never exist.
This cinematographic wink has spread rapidly to other social networks. Just one day after arriving on the internet, the Spanish-language website dedicated to ForuCinema cinema has shared it on its Twitter profile. It includes it in a comparison between the real scene, shot at the time by Robert Zemeckis, and the simulation created by EZRyderX47.
Can you imagine Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr. starring "Back to the Future"? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/VxchSVlHow
- FORUCINEMA ™ (@forucinema) February 15, 2020What is deepfake and what is it for
The name of this technology results from the combination of the terms deep learning ( fake ). It allows by means of artificial intelligence to place the face of a person in the body of another in moving images, in a video. It is achieved by creating a series of algorithms that memorize what are the characteristics of a data source and then build from scratch new examples from that data. In 2019, similar techniques to deepfake have allowed Robert de Niro and Al Pacino to be rejuvenated in The Irish , by Martin Scorsese, and Will Smith in Gemini , by Ang Lee.
Although it may seem like a powerful tool to feed hoaxes and fake news, there are projects that give positive use to this technique. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology uses it to keep people anonymous in the transmission of videos or photographs. As explained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in its digital publication, this initiative called DeepPrivacy uses a database of more than 1.5 million images to create a completely new face, which does not exist in real life. In this way, it gives a human face to the person who wishes to remain anonymous, and even manages to maintain their original gestures, without needing to associate it with a specific identity or hide it behind a cloud of pixels.
In the case of fraudulent use of deepfake , Since 2018 companies seek a specific regulation. The Pornhub website then eliminated its use in its contents, after videos appeared on its platform that artificially placed in pornographic scenes the face of well-known actors (Gal Gadot or Scarlett Johansson) and also of anonymous people.
The clearest example of a complaint against videos manipulated on social networks is the one that was popularized in summer 2019 by the British artist Bill Posters. He got Mark Zuckerberg to deliver a false speech. The founder and CEO of Facebook looks at the camera in this recording and says: “Imagine this for a second: a man with total control of the stolen data of billions of people, of all their secrets, their lives, their futures. I owe it all to Specter - the villain of Bond's last. Specter showed me that whoever controls the data controls the future. ”
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A shared publication of Bill Posters (@bill_posters_uk) on Jun 7, 2019 at 7:15 p.m. PDT
Harmless entertainment
In many cases, deepfake is spreading on the internet as mere entertainment. EZRyderX47 himself, author of the Back to the Future video, has other similar examples on his YouTube account. In them appears Clint Eastwood starring Crocodile Dundee (1986) or Keanu Reeves in Ghost Rider (2007).
One of the most popular paper exchanges in Hollywood is that of the YouTube channel Ctrl Shift Face, also specializing in deep entertainment entertainment. He hit the star of the action movie Sylvester Stallone as the main character of Solo at home (1990), replacing the then boy Macaulay Culkin. The publication, from December 2019, so far exceeds 5 million views.
In Spain, in full hangover of the 10-N elections, a parodic video created by FacetoFake emerged on social networks with the five presidential candidates as protagonists of the 80s action series Team A. Pablo Casado, Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Iglesias, Albert Rivera and Santiago Abascal appear on the recording forming Team E.
These are some of the videos that play with the personalities of familiar people.
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