Die Hard<\/em> had done no such thing and had no relationship with Deepcake, even though the company\u2019s website had a complimentary quote from the star.<\/p>\nThe episode raises a lot of questions, not least the meaning of identity at a time when one\u2019s image can be so easily faked. So I went to the source and spoke to Deepcake\u2019s founders. The two-year-old startup from the former Soviet state of Georgia is the project of Ukrainian-born CEO Maria Chmir, a marketing executive, and head of machine learning Alex Notchenko, who has a doctorate in AI. Chmir told me that the company never claimed to own Willis\u2019 future rights, but had a previous and mutually satisfying arrangement where Deepcake digitized his appearance in a 2021 ad for Megafon, a Russian cell network. The Willis ad is part of Deepcake\u2019s game plan to serve customers who want to digitally clone humans. \u201cWe are one of the first on the market to be commercially successful in the field of legal deepfakes,\u201d says Chmir. \u201cBut we don\u2019t like this word. These are sort of replicas, or digital twins.\u201d (I wondered why, if she wasn\u2019t fond of the word, she named her company on a variation of it, but whatever.)<\/p>\n
How good is that technology? Let\u2019s go to the tape. In the Megafon commercial, a person who is unmistakably Willis, even if you know it really is not, is among two hostages tied to a ship mast, next to a digital clock ticking down seconds before a bomb goes off. While the figure has Willis\u2019 face, it doesn\u2019t quite convey his trademark insouciance. And for some reason, this Willis has a different voice\u2014a gruff bark that speaks Russian. Still, it looks like Willis\u2014digitized and generated, Chmir says, by algorithms trained on 34,000 images from his earlier films.<\/p>\n
Chmir says that Willis was deepfaked because he wasn\u2019t available to travel, but the process makes economic sense as well. While leasing an actor\u2019s rights might be about 30 percent less than the usual appearance fee, she says, still bigger savings come from the lower costs of filming a cheap actor-double instead of a superstar, who requires first-class travel, a big trailer, and ridiculous demands in contract riders.<\/p>\n
But Deepcake isn\u2019t just faking superstars. They recently did a job for an agricultural firm that wanted to make educational videos starring its in-house expert, a busy person not comfortable in front of a camera. With the subject\u2019s permission, Deepcake converted video of an understudy in an exact duplicate. \u201cWe also cloned the voice for full similarity, of course,\u201d Chmir says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n