Technology has brought the world incredible things—air travel, space travel, cures for common ailments, the internet, and, of course, a deepfake that puts Steve Buscemi’s face on Jennifer Lawrence’s body.
Deepfakes, a portmanteau-word of “deep learning” and “fake,” use advanced machine learning technology to manipulate videos creating hyper-realistic, yet totally manufactured videos, that make it incredibly hard to tell what’s real and what is the creation of a fake news purveyor or a product of the imagination of someone with a lot of free time on their hands.
Such is the case with a video unearthed by journalist Mikael Thalen, who tweeted what can only be described as a truly stunning example of DeepFake technology. “I’ve gone down a black hole of the latest DeepFakes and this mashup of Steve Buscemi and Jennifer Lawrence is a sight to behold,” he wrote, sharing with the world the video where “Steve Buscemi” and “Jennifer Lawrence” were mashed together to answer a question at the Golden Globe Awards.
When real Steve Buscemi stopped by The Late Show on Wednesday, Stephen Colbert made sure he saw the video and asked him for his reaction. “I’ve never looked better,” the actor joked after watching the clip of himself, sort of, answering a question about his favorite Real Housewife. When asked whether he found the clip amusing or frightening, Buscemi responded, “It makes me sad that somebody spent that much time on that, because I bet that was hard to do.”
