It's very likely that soon we won't be able to tell when an actor is actually in a film and when they have been digitally inserted. 2013's The Congress explores the idea of a studio buying the rights to an actor's likeness so that she can continue to star in films even as she ages. YouTube channel Shamook is bringing us even closer to this kind of virtual reality with their new Indiana Jones video featuring Chris Pratt in the role of Indy.
"Taking images of Chris Pratt from other films, we were able to create a facial profile containing 5,000 HD photos of him," the channel wrote on the video description. "Then using deep fakes technology we can teach it to learn how to transfer his likeness onto Harrison Ford and create a completely new image never seen before."
The video features scenes from the first three Indiana Jones films. The technology, described as "deepfakes" appears to not only layer Pratt's face over Ford's, but also melds them so that expressions and mouth movements match.
According to the notes accompanying the video, "Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness leveraging powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence." Though decidedly interesting and cool, the technology does raise questions about who owns the likeness of an actor who is constantly in the public sphere.