Former U.S. President Richard Nixon appears in a video explaining that the Apollo 11 mission had ended in tragedy. The video in question is one of the best examples of "deepfake" technology, published to address its dangerous implications.
"Good evening, my fellow Americans," President Nixon appears to say in the video. "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 video, titled "In the Event of Moon Disaster" is a project of MIT's Center for Advanced Virtuality, which uses deepfake tech to depict the addressing of a tragedy that never happened.
Its creators, media artists Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta at MIT, collaborated with AI companies Respeecher and Canny AI to create a Nixon deepfake. The goal is to give people a glimpse into an alternate reality in which the moon landing mission failed.
Of course, the reality is that the Apollo mission was a huge success and one of mankind's greatest achievements. Its crewmembers -- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin -- returned back to Earth triumphantly.
In actuality, the speech used in the video was real and written in case the first men on the moon failed to return home. It was written by William Safire, President Nixon's speechwriter, and titled "In The Event of Moon Disaster." Of course, the then-president never had to deliver it.
The "In The Event of Moon Disaster" project actually premiered last year in November, but the video was re-released to coincide with the moon mission's 51st anniversary following the official launch of the project's website. In the website, several resources are cited, including a new documentary from Scientific American's Jeffery DelViscio that presents the video to experts in the fields of digital privacy, AI, human rights, and law.
But what exactly are deefpakes?
These are AI-manipulated videos that let creators design it to look as if the target did or said something that never actually really happened. Deepfakes were introduced to netizens when videos of celebrities were pasted into sex videos. Most recently, however, deepfake cons are targetting political figures.
Another former U.S. president was also the subject of one deepfake video that circulated in 2018. In it, Barack Obama badmouthed Donald Trump, the nation's current president, calling him a "d*psh*t."
The goal of "In The Event of Moon Disaster" is to explore the dangers of deepfake technology and encourage people to always "check your sources."
Watch the film below.
