Tom Holland is married to Nicki Minaj and has beef with Mark Zuckerberg. A British Deepfake series has sparked a heated debate over the use of AI technology.
In the Deepfake series Deep Fake Neighbour Wars, all of Hollywood lives in British suburbia. Marvel star Tom Holland has to kick Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg out of his flat. DC antihero Idris Elba lives with Kim Kardashian West. It all seems like innocent fun at the beginning.
But in the meantime, the reality series Deep Fake Neighbour Wars has stirred controversy over the moral and legal limits of artificial intelligence.
What exactly happens in the Deepfake reality show?
What are Deepfakes? Deepfakes are artificial media (images, movies and audio tracks) created using machine learning to replace or manipulate a person in a video or image. This Artificial Intelligence is the foundation of the British series Deep Fake Neighbour Wars.
In the production by broadcaster ITV, likenesses of well-known stars such as Tom Holland are placed on the bodies of actors and actresses. The likenesses were generated from countless images by AI (Artificial Intelligence). The figures, composed of the star’s face and the actor’s body, now fight out petty bourgeois neighbourhood disputes in their slippers. So much for the concept and the appeal of the series.
Watch a scene from Deep Fake Neighbour Wars here:
A debate has erupted between different parties over this, according to a report in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. A British actors’ union has started an anti-AI campaign for fear of rising unemployment among its members. But that’s not the only danger observers see in the use of deepfakes.
Fake-Tom Holland
“What’s to stop someone using a dead [star’s] face for publicity?” asks a TV critic in the Daily Mail article. Deepfakes are already being used for propaganda purposes to hoodwink viewers. For example, a manipulated video recently appeared featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj urging his troops to surrender.
Concerns about new AI technologies are not unwarranted. Seeing Tom Holland as a henpecked hero is entertaining. But it remains harmless fun only as long as the fake is recognisable.
