Someone Used Deepfake Technology to Put Harrison Ford in 'Solo'? Oh God

By Mike Redmond | Film | October 17, 2018 |

By Mike Redmond | Film | October 17, 2018 |

We live in contentious times where an alarming number of people have an extremely tenuous grasp on reality thanks in no small part to Donald Trump’s presidency and your mom joining Facebook. It’s f—king terrifying, so the last thing the internet needs is deepfake technology, which is an AI process absolutely buttloaded with disturbing possibilities like, say, putting any woman’s face into porn without her consent. Yup. Yup yup yup yup…

Via Polygon:

One of the most interesting additions to Tumblr’s revamped community guidelines mirrors a recent, disturbing trend: deepfake technology, which allows people to take one aspect of someone’s body and apply it to another video. This is particularly concerning in cases of revenge porn, where a woman’s face could be applied to another woman’s nude body or an adult film star’s clip to perpetuate an image that isn’t real.

It’s a concern, and one that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit are aware is growing. Reddit banned its popular r/deepfakes subreddit in February to try and tackle the problem of non-consenting sexual images and videos being shared among users. While there are some positive uses — people taking one movie character and adding it to another film — deepfake technology is mostly talked about for its disturbing uses. A popular video from Get Out director Jordan Peele used imagery of President Obama with Peele’s spot-on impersonation of the president to illustrate just how dangerous the technology could be in the wrong hands.

But while there’s an entire YA film trilogy in just those two paragraphs, there were also words about swapping movie characters! Whee! Which brings us to today where the internet is giddily devouring a deepfake video of Harrison Ford replacing Alden Ehrenreich in Solo. Sure, it was created using creepy-as-fuck AI technology that is now 100% aware that humans will readily stare at videos that have a thing that wasn’t originally in another thing, but Star Wars, y’all!

On a lighter note, this affront to god and nature is normal internet chicanery even though it’s a slap in the face to Ehrenreich who pulled off the nearly impossible and thankless task of making Solo a surprisingly solid ride. He’s not the one who slavishly loaded it with Easter eggs and origin minutiae to the point where Han now retroactively gets the credit for one of Princess Leia’s most badass moves, which is some bullshit along with the super fucked-up fate of L3.

But my nerd-ass is getting away from the point, and it’s that this has no business existing:

“HNNGHNNGNNN why am I wearing a stone-wash vest? Must… crash… space-car…”