Her “A powerful reminder that we can no longer trust our own eyes,Told a representative of the British broadcaster Channel 4 the Guardian. Every year the BBC broadcasts a special Christmas address for the nation of Queen Elizabeth II. But it’s 2020 and that means everything has to be extra weird. Channel 4 has therefore seized the moment to be own deepfake version of the Queen’s Christmas message.
Played by actress Debra Stephenson, the deepfaked Queen began her speech by thanking Channel 4 for the opportunity to speak from the heart. She then goes on to make crack about Harry and Megha go away the British Royal family and health workers taking charge of their lives to treat Prime Minister Boris Johnson. S.he too takes a not-so-subtle dig at Prince Andrew’s relationship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
If you have poor eyesight and limited hearing, perhaps power, let the fake queen fool you on a busy Christmas day. But by the time she starts talking about Netflix and starts a dance routine, you can be sure that something is up. Channel 4 makes little effort to hide its deception, but that hasn’t stopped some critics from voicing their discomfort with the stunt.
“We have to be very careful to make people think they can’t believe what they’re seeing,” Sam Gregory, program director of the human rights organization Witness, told The Guardian. “If you haven’t seen them before, this could lead you to believe that deep counterfeits are a more widespread problem than they are. “
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Deepfakes use machine learning to analyze a batch of images and output a video approach to what it could look like when you say, Office space played the cast of The matrix. But the technique requires a lot of computing power and artistic nuance on the part of a maker to fool someone. Earlier this year, the creators of South Park released a deepfake web series including fake images of Mark Zuckerberg and Jared Kushner. Even with the resources and talent available to the showrunners of the most successful TV series of all time, the deepfakes were still pretty awkward.
But the method of fakery only gets more convincing and easier for beginners. If deepfakes don’t turn out to be a major source of dangerous misinformation, they will give Channel 4 its own annual Christmas address of the Queen for at least years.