Our final session took our interests towards Social Media, Deepfakes & Memes. Deepfakes & Memes are something which have dramatically increased in popularity during the last decade as a medium mainly for short form, playing into their easily shareable nature.
Initial Story.
During our session we got the opportunity to create some deepfakes as part of a practical exercise. Using the free app ‘reface’ I was able to create a basic deepfake to run in a short GIF. While not necessarily photo realistic like some other methods, the app is an example of efforts to make deepfakes more accessible to people without needing powerful hardware to make them a reality.
Industry Uses
Deepfakes, as mentioned earlier have been used in industry and are at many times at the centre of controversy due to their ability to ‘resurrect’ actors in certain roles. This was recently seen in Rogue One in 2016 where deepfakes (among a couple of other technologies) were used to recreate Peter Cushing's likeness for a role he left during 1977.