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In this AI-powered face swap deepfake video, Bezos plays a Talosian alien, while Musk plays Captain Christopher Pike.
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hough the video is aimed at getting a good laugh, it can cause severe reputational damage, and humiliation and ridicule from viewers.”
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Social media companies tend not to remove them outright from their platforms unless they are pornographic.
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two biggest names in the technology world starred in the pilot episode of the original Star Trek, "The Cage", or so it seemed.
A has been created. In this particular , Bezos plays a Talosian alien with a huge bald head, while Musk plays Captain Christopher Pike (who is the captain of the USS Enterprise before James T. Kirk).
"In the not too distant future Elon Musk will save us from the captivity of Jeff Bezos' Amazon illusion. Elon Musk and Talosian Jeff Bezos in Star Trek's pilot episode 'The Cage' deepfake.”
- TheFakening, YouTuber
The deepfake is highly convincing even though not real and the face and the voice of the people are manipulated to say anything the programmer wants.
The video has since been watched over 35,000 times.
Since you would be wondering, here’s a very short version of what’s going on in this scene: in this episode, the Talosian aliens capture Pike to enslave him and use him to breed humans that will be used to rebuild a destroyed society. Pike tries to escape throughout the episode, and eventually, the Talosians decide that humans’ resistance to captivity won’t make them a good fit for that plan.
The conversation is kind of hard to follow, and that’s probably because the clips from the episode are stitched together to make it seem like it’s only the Talosian alien and Captain Pike having a conversation. In the actual episode, several other characters are critical to the conversation that this deepfake doesn’t show.
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But even though the scene is confusing, the deepfake is scarily impressive, particularly the unsettling-looking Bezos as a Talosian alien. It “marks” the second Star Trek cameo for the Amazon CEO: he appeared in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, also as a big-headed alien.
Deepfakes: A Disturbing Trend
Though the video is aimed at getting a good laugh, other deepfakes have long been misinterpreted. Earlier this year, a digitally altered video appeared to show Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, slurring drunkenly through a speech.
The video went viral on social channels and got tweeted by US President Donald Trump on twitter saying: "PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE".
It got a million views before being debunked. Trump still hasn't deleted the video which has been retweeted over 30,000 times.
"Deepfakes are one of the most alarming trends I have witnessed as a Congresswoman to date If the American public can be made to believe and trust altered videos of presidential candidates, our democracy is in grave danger. We need to work together to stop deepfakes from becoming the defining feature of the 2020 elections."
- Yvette Clarke, US Congresswoman
The approach of the social media companies towards deepfakes is not to remove them but to reduce the circulation of or to filter them out - unless they are pornographic. Deepfakes can causes victims to suffer severe reputational damage, not to mention ongoing humiliation and ridicule from viewers.
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