This disturbingly realistic deepfake puts Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in a Star Trek episode

A new deepfake puts Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the pilot episode of the original Star Trek, “The Cage” — and I kind of love it. In this particular AI-powered face swap, Bezos plays a Talosian alien with a huge bald head, while Musk plays Captain Christopher Pike (who is the captain of the USS Enterprise before James T. Kirk).

Here’s a very short version of what’s going on in this scene, if you’re wondering: in this episode, the Talosian aliens capture Pike to enslave him and use him to breed humans that will be used to rebuild a destroyed society. Pike tries to escape throughout the episode, and eventually, the Talosians decide that humans’ resistance to captivity won’t make them a good fit for that plan.

The conversation is kind of hard to follow, and that’s probably because the clips from the episode are stitched together to make it seem like it’s only the Talosian alien and Captain Pike having a conversation. In the actual episode, there are a number of other characters who are critical to the conversation that this deepfake doesn’t show.

But even though the scene is confusing, I think the deepfake is scarily impressive, particularly the unsettling-looking Bezos as a Talosian alien. It “marks” the second Star Trek cameo for the Amazon CEO: he appeared in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, also as a big-headed alien.

Source: www.theverge.com