Would Facebook react differently when its own founder was being manipulated? In response to Facebook’s refusal to remove the video of Nancy Pelosi, artist Bill Posters posted this on Facebook-owned Instagram in June, showing Mark Zuckerberg boasting of how the platform "owns" its users. Art by Bill Posters & for #artnotmisinformation #thefutureisntprivate #deepfakes #deepfake #spectreknows #surveillancecapitalism #privacy #democracy #dataism #contemporaryartwork #digitalart #generativeart #newmediaart #codeart #markzuckerberg #artivism #contemporaryart Bill Posters (opens in new tab)
This artwork is part of a series of AI generated video works created for ‘Spectre’ - an immersive exploration of the digital influence industry, technology and democracy. ‘I wish I could.’ (2019) Mark Zuckerberg, founder of reveals the ‘truth’ about privacy on #facebook. High-profile figures make for such perfect sources in deepfaking because their public profiles provide plenty of source material for an AI to learn from, but with the number of selfies the average person takes in a lifetime and rapid technological advances, perhaps soon anyone could be used as a source. Less than a year before the above video, University of Washington computer scientists used neural network AI to model the shape of Obama’s mouth and make it lip sync to audio input (opens in new tab). Politicians and celebrities are often the subjects of deepfakes. FakeApp was then used to refine the footage through more than 50 hours of automatic processing. Peele’s mouth was pasted over Obama’s, replacing the former president’s jawline with one that followed Peele’s mouth movements. Many of the most convincing deepfake examples have been created with the help of impersonators that mimick the source’s voice and gestures, just like this video produced by BuzzFeed and comedian Jordan Peele using After Effects CC and FakeApp.