Is That Actor Real? The Lowdown on Deepfakes

June 27, 2019Media Mention
Backstage

Remember when director Denis Villeneuve resurrected a 1982-era Sean Young as the legendary replicant Rachael in “Blade Runner 2049”? The film, which premiered in 2017, showed a woman on screen who hadn’t aged a day thanks to a combination of CGI, photographs, film scans and other images of Young from both the original movie and others from the era.

Now, the same groundbreaking technology is bringing into question ownership of an actor’s image. Recently, the nation’s union for screen talent, SAG-AFTRA, is speaking on “deepfakes,” or the artificial intelligence that allows for productions to use an actor’s likeness in a project after it has wrapped, potentially without the actor’s involvement.  

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