A Deepfake Nixon Delivers Eulogy for the Apollo 11 Astronauts

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed safely on the Moon in July 1969, President Richard Nixon called them from the White House during their moonwalk to say how proud he was of what they had accomplished. But in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin did not make it safely off the Moon’s surface, Nixon was prepared to give a very different sort of speech. The remarks were written by William Safire and recorded in a memo called In Event of Moon Disaster.

Fifty years ago, not even Stanley Kubrick could have faked the Moon landing. But today, visual effects and techniques driven by machine learning are so good that it might be relatively simple, at least the television broadcast part of it.¹ In a short demonstration of that technical supremacy, a group from MIT has created a deepfake version of Nixon delivering that disaster speech. Here are a couple of clips from the deepfake speech:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

The full film is being shown at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam and will make its way online sometime next year.

The implications of being able to so convincingly fake the televised appearance of a former US President are left as an exercise to the reader. (via boing boing)

Update: The whole film is now online. (thx, andy)

1. But technology is often a two-way street. If the resolution of the broadcast is high enough, CGI probably still has tells…and AI definitely does. And even if you got the TV broadcast correct, with the availability of all sorts of high-tech equipment, the backyard astronomer, with the collective help of their web-connected compatriots around the world, would probably be able to easily sniff out whether actual spacecraft and communication signals were in transit to and from the Moon.↩

• Apollo
• Apollo 11
• artificial intelligence
• remix
• Richard Nixon
• space
• video