When fakes get real; Deepfake YouTuber hired by Lucasfilm photo from PCMag Asia
Entertainment

When fakes get real; Deepfake YouTuber hired by Lucasfilm

Jul 28, 2021, 9:11 AM
Heloise Diamante

Heloise Diamante

Writer

Lucasfilms has confirmed that YouTuber Shamook joined the team and wrote about the company’s growing interest in machine learning and AI.

YouTuber Shamook, known for his deepfake videos including fixing the de-aged Luke Skywalker cameo in The Mandalorian season 2, has confirmed his employment with Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic.

Deepfake is an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can replace a person’s face in a picture or video with someone else’s.

In a statement, ILM confirmed that Shamook joined the team and wrote about the company’s growing interest in machine learning and AI.

“Over the past several years ILM has been investing in both machine learning and A.I. as a means to produce compelling visual effects work and it’s been terrific to see momentum building in this space as the technology advances,” the statement read.

The Mandalorian season 2 aired its finale in December with a cameo of a young Luke Skywalker using visual effects (VFX) but was met with criticisms online.

Shamook was only one of the deepfake YouTuber who attempted to enhance the VFX and make the virtual young Skywalker more realistic and, to many, palatable.

While deepfake technology is being used on YouTube for entertainment purposes, others warn about the dangers of the manipulated videos to spread misinformation.

There are growing concerns about the use of deepfake videos by politicians who might “want to appear to say or do things that never actually occurred.”

While deepfake technology has only been around recently, it is widely popular and easily accessible that some large corporations like Facebook and Microsoft are developing a counter-technology to detect and remove deepfake videos.

Earlier this year, Facebook challenged netizens to create the technology to detect deepfakes and other manipulated media. The competition drew more than 2,000 participants.

In June, Facebook shared that the top model achieved an accuracy of 65.18 percent over the total submission of 35,109 models.

“This outcome reinforces the importance of learning to generalize to unforeseen examples when addressing the challenges of deepfake detection,” Facebook said in a statement.

While we can surely look forward to better visual effects content from Lucasfilms, people should also remain vigilant on spotting deepfake videos and reporting misinformation online.

Tags: #Shamook, #deepfakes, #Lucasfilms


We take a stand
OpinYon News logo

Designed and developed by Simmer Studios.

© 2024 OpinYon News. All rights reserved.