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While America’s Got Talent was presenting Elvis singing ‘live’ in the 17th season final, the finale of BBC / Peacock drama The Capture (season 2) reached its altogether more sinister conclusion. What they have in common, aside from NBC Universal as producer, is the use of deepfakes and video manipulation to twist the truth. While AGT’s was an entertaining gimmick and The Capture’s was a compelling hook on which to hang conspiracy theories, they both prompt questions about the ethics of a technology that is only going to get harder to detect.
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If you haven’t seen
“Simon Cowell” performing Chicago’s ‘You’re The Inspiration’ on the America’s Got Talent stage,
then here it is.
https://youtu.be/UJNMYJrDMc0
That was in the audition rounds and was deemed good enough
by the judges to get into the semis and then the final.
In the final, this is what Metaphysic, the company behind the technology, did to Elvis and
judges Heidi Klum and Sofia Vergara.
As you can see, it’s all pretty clunky with cameras needing
to be placed directly in front of the actual performer’s faces for the effect
to work.
But this is live TV in front of a live audience and it’s
pretty impressive for all that.
Metaphysic
founders Chris Umé and Tom Graham, previously
made the viral internet sensation DeepTomCruise.
They describe what they do as creating Synthetic Media. This is the rapidly-expanding world of digital
experiences and objects
generated with input from artificial intelligence.
Metaphysic
say they are pioneering ‘hyperreal synthetic videos’.
As they explain to Bernard Marr for the Tom Cruise deepfake videos Umé
spent nearly three months training an AI model on images and videos of the real
Cruise, capturing
him from multiple angles and in a variety of lighting conditions. Then they shot base videos using a body double, then
generated the deepfake videos by combining the body double footage with actual
video of Cruise’s face.
The duo followed a
similar process for their performance at AGT and plan to commercialize
the technology, called Every Anyone,
that people can use to create their own hyperreal likenesses.
“We could create
hyperreal synthetic versions of
regular people, including voices and faces,” Umé told Marr.
In future, they
think, as much as 80% of the time we
spend online will be in these types of synthetic content interactions that will
feature regular people. Metaphysic plan to scale synthetic media and make it more accessible to regular
users for use on social media, virtual education or office work, video games, and more.
“We strongly
believe that our technology is a positive force within the media landscape,”
the company states on its website. “When content suddenly becomes hyperreal, it
is a lot more engaging. Furthermore, we see a future where AI can break
language barriers and bring communities together.”
That’s all very fluffy and nice but some critics say that
popularizing deepfakes is dangerous. They worry that bad actors can use the
technology to spread lies and disinformation.
According to an MIT
Technology report, deepfakes can be "a perfect weapon for purveyors of
fake news who want to influence everything from stock prices to
elections."
“What we hope
doesn’t happen,” Graham tells Marr, “is that large corporations or bad actors use [your] data to create versions of you without your
consent, your permission, or without
your direct interaction. What we're
trying to create with Every Anyone is a way for individuals to own and control your data, the data that you
bring into the internet and use
to train content creation. The algorithm should belong to you, and you should be able to delete it.”
Metaphysic say
that their tool will safeguard
user’s private biometric face and voice data.
It’s his hope that by raising awareness of
the technology on primetime TV “ that media can be manipulated, and maybe you should take a beat before you
send that [content] on or before you see some kind of video online and you
become outraged or have a particular emotional reaction.”
The Capture called into question our cast iron belief
in the veracity of CCTV and surveillance cameras to record and prosecute crime.
Time called it the only must-see Peacock original.
The first series of
the drama explained how even seemingly live video could be switched out for
false recordings with the stitch masked by a bus or truck crossing the screen.
That’s a technique familiar to editors since Alfred Hitchcock used it to create
the impression of a single take drama in Rope (1948). The second season
focused on machine vision and AI to automate process.
Hacking the feed of
security cameras is also staple of heist movies from Mission Impossible
to Oceans Eleven but in those films the technology is presented as state
of the art and one that only impacts on the integrity of a vault. In The
Capture, the public at large is being duped by a state intelligence
apparatus using ultra realistic deepfakes to stage alternate realities.
Paranoia makes for
a good drama but The Capture’s premise feels all too possible – and
AGT’s gimmick should raise the alarm.
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