Deepfake Luke Skywalker Should Scare Us
Tell it to me in Star Wars,” Tracy Jordan demands of Frank Rossitano in an episode of 30 Rock, when Frank tries to explain the “uncanny valley.” As Frank puts it, people like droids like C-3PO (vaguely human-like) and scoundrels with hearts of gold like Han Solo (a real person), but are creeped out by weirdly unnatural CGI stormtroopers (or Tom Hanks in The Polar Express). More than a decade after that scene aired, Star Wars is still clambering out of the uncanny valley: Most fans were thrilled to see a digital cameo from a young Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian. But he—along with recreations of young Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin from the original Star Wars film—didn’t look real, which for some was unnerving.
These are all examples of what have come to be known as deepfakes, a catchall term for synthetically manipulated or generated images or videos of people or just about anything. The name derives from the fact that most methods for creating deepfakes rely on deep neural networks, the same basic architecture that underlies most of the AI we encounter on a daily basis, like face and voice recognition. And because the technology is constantly and rapidly improving, so are the deepfakes. Deepfake Luke recently appeared, just about a year later, looking impressively realistic.
