Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk face off in disturbing Star Trek deepfake video

Navin Bondade 0 Comments

As we all know that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Blue Origin of Jeff Bezos having a tough competition to become the leader of the space industry. An impressive deepfake of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk placed in a Start Trek scene has displayed this struggle between tech champion beautifully and hilariously.

The video is shared by The Faking, features Bezos and Musk in the pilot episode of the original Star Trek series, ‘The Cage’. In the episode, Kirk’s predecessor Christopher Pike lands on a distant planet and confronts the big-brained Talosian aliens. In the video, Bezos takes the form of Talosian & Musk plays human Pike.

Deepfake technology works by training an algorithm on lots of images or videos of someone’s face, then it uses machine learning or artificial intelligence to combine digital images with audio files to make convincing-looking fake footage of people uttering words they’ve actually said in real life.

By using software to map that face onto a piece of footage of someone else, the team of Fakening imposed Bezos on the body of one of the bulbous-headed alien race the Talosians and Musk superimposed onto Pike.

“In the not too distant future, Elon Musk will save us from the captivity of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon illusion,” The Fakening wrote on the video’s description. The channel specializes in altering videos with high tech technology and placing celebrities in odd backdrops.

Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of British deepfake startup Synthesia said the video was a “great example” of deepfake technology.

“I think this is a great example of the current state of the art in highly realistic face-swapping. Results like these still require lots of custom work and artistry along with significant expense on compute power (I’d estimate $100-300) but it’s in the hands of passionate individuals, not companies,” Riparbelli told Business Insider.

This isn’t the first time Jeff Bezos has appeared as this particular alien. In an episode of “South Park” from 2018 Bezos was depicted as a Talosian. Bezos is himself a “Star Trek” fan, and even had a cameo in the 2016 film “Star Trek: Beyond.”

Elon Musk is not as an overt a fan-like Bezos but has overlapped with the show as he was name-dropped in “Star Trek: Discovery”