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Chinese A-lister falls victim to deepfake video stunt
It happened to Gal Gadot, Scarlett Johansson and Barack Obama. Now it’s happening to Chinese celebrities
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This article originally appeared on ABACUS
China is waking up to the problem of deepfakes. But is China ready to fight them?
The face-stitching technology allows people to digitally insert a person into a scene they were never in -- whether it’s making Obama say things he’s never said, casting Nicolas Cage as Lois Lane, or even inserting Scarlett Johansson into porn films.
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In the US, everyone from lawmakers to actors have criticized the technology, with the Black Widow actress saying, “The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause.”
Now China is dealing with the problem. A video that splices one of the country’s biggest actresses on to a 25-year-old TV drama is one of the top trending stories on Weibo, with the related hashtag being read over 120 million times.
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The video isn’t as sinister as Johansson’s. The actress, Yang Mi, takes the place of an older actress in a period drama. Some cruelly joke that the deepfake version of Yang Mi is a better actress than the real one. But others have more serious concerns.
One Weibo user wrote, “I remember foreign actresses speaking out against these videos on Instagram. But somehow this is gaining traction in China. I am speechless.”
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