Harrison Ford is iconic, from Rick Deckard, to Indiana Jones, and of course, Han Solo. His playful magnetism was something Disney tried to recapture with Alden Ehrenreich in Solo. Critics called Solo average at best, something nobody would dream to call Ford.
One Star Wars fan decided to take things into their own hands. Using deep learning algorithms that can map one person's face onto another's—creating what's known as a 'deepfake'—the YouTube account derpfakes was able to insert Ford's into a few moments into Solo. It doesn't work all the time, but the moments it does are wild.
This is not the first time that an actor's face has been digitally inserted into a Star Wars film, though this instance is a bit more renegade than the appearances of Grand Moff Tarkin or Princess Leia in Rogue One. Similarly, it is not the first time that AI tinkerers have used deep learning software to put celebrities' faces on other people's bodies without their permission.
The person behind derpfakes has that context in mind, and expands on it in an essay from September expressing a desire to raise awareness that this technology exists in hopes of preventing people from being duped by fakes.
"Would widespread awareness of deepfakes prevent them too being used as a political tool or a political weapon in a similar fashion? Probably not," the essay admits, "but I would suggest it could stop the natural tendancies [sic] of some to immediately jump to the conclusion of an authentic work and believe whatever they see."
For the moment, it's just fun to see a glimpse of Solo from an alternate universe where Harrison Ford never ages, or has a clone.
Source: io9
David Grossman is a staff writer for PopularMechanics.com. He's previously written for The Verge, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and several other publications. He's based out of Brooklyn.
