Charli XCX music video used Deepfakes tech convincingly

When mainstream readers first became aware of Deepfakes at the end of 2017, it was thanks to a creepy subculture that used the face-swapping tool to insert celebrities into pornography. More recently, experts have worried that the same AI technology could supercharge fake news. But here’s evidence that Deepfakes could also be used for mainstream video editing: the latest music video from Charli XCX uses the technology as a special effect. The “1999” video is a perfect use case for Deepfakes. In it, Charli and singer Troye Sivan pay homage to various 1990s touchstones, like Steve Jobs, TLC’s “Waterfalls” music video, Titanic, the Nokia 3310, The Sims, and so on. At two points, the creators of the video used the same basic deepfakes algorithms to paste Charli and Sivan’s faces onto dancers imitating the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys.
"“can we use this weird fake celeb porn tool in a legit music video?”" Ryan Staake, the video’s director and head of creative studio Pomp&Clout, says the decision to use deepfakes was part artistic, part practical.