Hello everyone. So now Elon want to buy Twitter, reportedly to help him X . build, the “everything” app. Nice of him to name it after his child.
The clear view
For several days in late September, it seemed clear to no one who owned Bruce Willis. The British newspaper The Telegraph alleged that the actor, who has retired from aphasia, had digitally reincarnated his career by selling performance rights to a company called Deepcake, which used artificial intelligence technology to map Willis’s face on another actor. Not long after, Willis representatives said the star of die hard hadn’t done such a thing and had no relationship with Deepcake, even though the company’s website had a free quote from the star.
The episode raises many questions, not least the meaning of identity at a time when one’s image can be so easily faked. So I went to the source and spoke to the founders of Deepcake. The two-year-old startup from the former Soviet state of Georgia is the project of Ukrainian-born CEO Maria Chmir, a marketing manager and head of machine learning Alex Notchenko, who has a PhD in AI. Chmir told me that the company never claimed to own Willis’ future rights, but had a previous and mutually satisfactory arrangement where Deepcake digitized his appearance in a 2021 advertisement for Megafon, a Russian mobile network. The Willis ad is part of Deepcake’s game plan to serve customers who want to digitally clone humans. “We are one of the first on the market to be commercially successful in legal deepfakes,” says Chmir. “But we don’t like this word. These are kind of replicas, or digital twins.” (I wondered why, if she didn’t love the word, she named her company after some variation of it, but whatever.)
How good is that technology? Let’s go to the band. In the Megafon commercial, a person who is unmistakably Willis, even if you know it isn’t, is one of two hostages tied to a ship’s mast, next to a digital clock that ticks seconds before a bomb goes off. Although the figure has the face of Willis, it doesn’t quite portray his signature indifference. And for some reason, this Willis has a different voice: a gruff bark who speaks Russian. Still, it looks like Willis — digitized and generated, Chmir says, by algorithms trained on 34,000 images from his earlier films.
Chmir says Willis was deeply faked for not being available to travel, but the process also makes economic sense. While leasing an actor’s rights is about 30 percent less than the usual fee for a performance, she says, even greater savings come from the lower cost of filming a cheap actor double rather than a superstar, who needs first-class travel, a large trailer, and ridiculous demands from contract drivers.
But Deepcake isn’t just fake superstars. They recently did a job for an agricultural company that wanted to make educational videos starring its in-house expert, a busy person who doesn’t feel comfortable in front of a camera. With the subject’s permission, Deepcake converted an understudy’s video into an exact duplicate. “We also cloned the voice for full similarity, of course,” Chmir says.
