President Nixon Never Actually Gave This Apollo 11 Disaster Speech. MIT Brought It To Life To Illustrate Power Of Deepfakes
Bob Shaffer | WBUR 90.9
November 22, 2019
https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/11/22/mit-nixon-deep-fake

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Imagine a past in which the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969 — but then became stranded there, leading then-President Nixon to give a speech memorializing the astronauts.

A new MIT film installation uses that exact premise to shed light on so-called deepfake videos and how they are used to spread misinformation. Deepfakes use artificial intelligence technologies to create or alter a video to make them untrue in some way.

MIT's Center for Advanced Virtuality created a video of Nixon giving a speech that was actually written for him — but that he never ended up delivering. The video is the centerpiece of “In Event of Moon Disaster," opening Friday at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). The installation was supported by the Mozilla Foundation and the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Film co-director Francesca Panetta says doctored videos like these have been a concern in current affairs and politics — but this effort points to another danger.

"Deepfakes can be used for many of the things we already know," Panetta says, "but also to create kind of alternative histories or have the potential to kind of rewrite history as well."

https://youtu.be/yaq4sWFvnAY
Halsey Burgund
Nov 21, 2019

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