by ELMORE TERADONOVICH, Alternate Reality News Service Film and Television Writer
A new video has been circulating around the internet in the past week featuring elderly men and women marching down a street in Charlottesville, North Carolina chanting, “Jews vill replace you! Jews vill replace you!” as consternated neo-Nazis powerlessly look on in horror. Okay, neo-Nazis always look consternated – they should really get more fibre in their diets. And given that most of the protesters in the street are using walkers or wheelchairs, the horror may be a little exaggerated.
“That’s not what happened!” protested – if I may be allowed a little whimsy – historian Michael Beschloss. “The Nazis were the ones who marched in Charlottesville! Ordinary people were the ones who looked on in horror!”
But…the video.
“Look…at the young man in the crowd making the Nazi salute,” Beschloss pointed out. “And again there. And again. And again. This video is obviously a deep fake!”
“Busted!” said Arondissement Farhat, the Executive Gruppenfuhrer of Bigots Without Borders, with a laugh. “Still, it’s the way our members would have liked things in Charlottesville to have gone down. So, I wouldn’t refer to the video as ‘fake” so much as ‘aspirational.'”
How was the video created? According to experts (of which there are none, given the newness of the technology), you start with base video of the street in Charlottesville where the march took place. Then, an Artificial Intelligence program combs the internet for video of Nazis. After CGI software puts them on the side of the road, AI searches for looks of horror that can be used to replace the looks of smug rage that are on the faces of the Nazis. Finally, the AI searches for elderly people and employs CGI to insert them walking down the street and simple audio editing tools to add the chant.
The software is so simple to use, a seven year-old could have made the video. “Let’s leave my daughter Wilhelmina out of this!” Farhat angrily demanded.
“AI!” despaired Founder and Executive Director of Bastard AI Governance and Safety, Canada Wyatt Tessari L’Allie (his real name). “Bastard AI!”
“The video isn’t even that good,” L’Allie pointed out. He had a point. If you read the lips of the marchers, you can see that the elderly people are saying things like, “Have you seen my glasses? I could have sworn they were here somewhere!”, “Again, with the walking! What is it with you and walking! Are you trying to kill me or something?” and “Is it soup yet?” They clearly aren’t chanting so much as kvetching at high volume.
“Wilhelmina!” Farhat shouted over his shoulder. “What did I tell you about matching the mouth movements to the chant?”
“I was going to,” a young girl’s voice shouted from another room, “but it was bedtime!”
“This is bad,” Beschloss commented. “This is very bad. If we can’t agree on basic historical events because half of us are watching contemporaneous videos of events and the other half are watching deep fakes that purport to show the opposite of what the contemporaneous videos show, our politics will forever remain polarized. How can you run a country that way?”
Basic historic events? Like the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust? Or that the Civil War was fought primarily over the issue of slavery? Or that Martin Luther King said more than, “I have a dream?” A lot more. Or are those the kind of deep fake videos you’re talking about?
“I guess I picked the wrong day to stop using primary sources,” Beschloss mused. “Good thing I haven’t stopped using cocaine.”
As if to prove his point, a thirty second video of The Battle of Gettysburg has appeared on the internet which portrays the Confederate Army kicking the Union Army’s ass. The video is grainy and scratchy and seems to feature the same cannon going off every three seconds, but as far as Farhat is concerned: “It’s definitive proof that everything we’ve been taught about the Civil War has been a lie!”
“Oh, my,” Beschless responded. “I may have to start using speedballs!”
I’m sure he was just referencing dialogue from an old disaster movie. If deep fakes do to history what it has already done to fiction writing, the law and professional lawn darts, he could be setting himself up for a career in film criticism. As if the internet hasn’t already given me enough competition!
Morgan Freeman’s dimple was unavailable for comment.