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MIT Team Creates Deepfake of President Nixon Reading "Moon Disaster" Apollo 11 Contingency Speech

posted by martyb on Tuesday July 21 2020, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the alternate-history dept.

takyon writes:

A Nixon Deepfake, a 'Moon Disaster' Speech and an Information Ecosystem at Risk

What can former U.S. president Richard Nixon possibly teach us about artificial intelligence today and the future of misinformation online? Nothing. The real Nixon died 26 years ago.

But an AI-generated likeness of him shines new light on a quickly evolving technology with sizable implications, both creative and destructive, for our current digital information ecosystem. Starting in 2019, media artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology teamed up with two AI companies, Canny AI and Respeecher, to create a posthumous deepfake. The synthetic video shows Nixon giving a speech he never intended to deliver—half a century after the subject it addresses.

Here's the (real) backstory: In July 1969, as the Apollo 11 astronauts glided through space on their trajectory toward the moon, William Safire, then one of Nixon's speechwriters, wrote "In Event of Moon Disaster" as a contingency. The speech is a beautiful homage to Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, the two astronauts who descended to the lunar surface—never to return in this version of history. It ends by saying, "For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."

The full deepfake speech can be viewed at https://moondisaster.org.

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  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday July 22 2020, @11:54AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Wednesday July 22 2020, @11:54AM (#1024908) Journal
    Neal Stephenson envisioned something of the sort in a side plot from his 2019 novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. A well-orchestrated bit of fake news involving the supposed detonation of a nuclear device in Moab, Utah winds up dividing the world into groups of people who rightly believe that the supposed nuking of Moab is a hoax (as there is no actual verifiable evidence of the event ever really happening), and those who believe the false narrative, who eventually become increasingly radicalised. Stephenson calls this "the Facebooking of America". He says of this in an interview [pcmag.com]: "...actually when I originally wrote an earlier version of the Moab section, it was prior to the events of the 2016 election and at the time I sort of was patting myself on the back for really being on top of things and predicting the future. And then I discovered that the future was way ahead of me."
    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
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