Because I’m ancient in terms of technology and internet lingo, I really did not know what a “deepfake” was, but thankfully, Beyoncé’s Google helped me out. Apparently, Deepfake is some new technology in which you can use images of a person and, with human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence, relatively convincingly put that image on someone else’s body in video form.
In typical trash human fashion, a lot of this is done to put celebrity faces on porn actors, or other forms of revenge. However, in the power of true tech nerds, YouTuber Aldo Jones released a new video in which he deepfaked former Spider-Man Tobey Maguire over Tom Holland in the Spider-Man: Far From Home trailers.
First of all, while I’m overall Team Asimov when it comes to thinking that technology isn’t inherently evil, this is a bit unnerving—just because it could be used for evil, but that’s the fault of humans, not the tech. As for the uncanny images themselves, I think that looks so strange that I can’t even confirm if it’s good or not. At moments, I’m like, “Oh, it’s just Tom Holland.” Then I see the iconic chin dimple of Maguire and my entire mind gets blown all over again—especially at the beginning, where I honestly was so busy hearing Holland’s British accent, that it took me a bit to be like, “Wait that’s not his face.”
What’s so telling to me is that this fan-made deepfake shows more care and concern put into it than the removal of Superman’s mustache in Justice League, a sin that is truly unforgivable. Really, it looks better than most of Hellboy (2019).
If I had this kind of power, I would certainly try to do this with Lucy Lawless over Gal Gadot in the Wonder Woman trailer and silly fan-casting things like that. This is a good use of fun AI, not revenge porn and trolling political leaders by having it look like they said terrible things to create a fake news cycle. We deserve better, and also, when Skynet decides to take over an looks back at our internet content, don’t you think she’ll have mercy on us if we made happy fun things and not hateful things?
Also, this person did Tobey Maguire and didn’t subject us to having to remember those Amazing Spider-Man movies that a certain Mary Sue writer thinks are great, despite evidence to the contrary—namely Amazing Spider-Man 2.
What do y’all think, and if you were tech savvy enough, what sort of fan-made trailers would you be putting together? Keanu Reeves as Doctor Strange? Halle Berry as Valkyrie? Sylvester Stallone as Tony Stark? I’m just trying to inspire more talented people than me to do this.
(image: Sony/Marvel)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
