You’re tearing me apart, Lisa! No. Wait. It’s reality that’s being torn apart and Lisa isn’t the culprit, it’s astoundingly realistic deepfake technology. Check out the evidence of that claim in a new deepfake video from YouTuber Ctrl Shift Face, in which Brad Pitt replaces Tommy Wiseau in the cult classic and “best worst movie ever,” The Room.
Ctrl Shift Face’s The Room clip featuring Brad Pitt’s face in place of Tommy Wiseau’s.
Ctrl Shift Face, who’s delivered ridiculously realistic and perfectly paired deepfake movie clips in the past—including this one of Keanu Reeves in Scarface and this one of Elon Musk in 2001: A Space Odyssey—knocks it out of the park again with this version of The Room starring Brad Pitt. And while mad skills were obviously required on Ctrl Shift Face’s end in order to make this deepfake happen, it’s hard not to think the fact that Wiseau and Pitt have the less same jawline helped to make the transition so seamless.
In the clip, we see Johnny played by… the face of Brad Pitt and the body of Tommy Wiseau, as he interacts with his ever-so-salacious girlfriend, Lisa. Throughout the scene, Pitt’s facial facade stays stuck to Wiseau’s so effectively that one would have to wonder: If somebody never saw the original version of The Room or knew anything about it before being shown this clip, would they believe Brad Pitt was actually in the movie? It is the best worst movie of all time, after all—incidentally, one that made $1,800 on a $6,000,000 budget.
A clip from The Room starring Brad Pitt (although not really). But be honest though: You’d watch it, right?
In terms of how this magic is happening, that all comes down to big data and AI. In order to transition one face to another, video of both the original face and new face that will be plastered onto it has to be collected—the faces have to demonstrate a series of facial expressions, and be seen under different levels of light for the best quality results. Once videos of both faces have been collected, neural networks, which are sophisticated machine learning algorithms, use the spatial and temporal information from them to map one face onto another. (This is obviously an oversimplification and doesn’t take into account deepfake’s use of Generative Adversarial Networks.)
As of right now, Wiseau hasn’t tweeted about the deepfake clip, but we really hope he does. Because a reality where a world’s best worst movie actor comments on one of the world’s best actor’s faces being put on his own via his social media account with 286,000 followers, some of whom may or may not even be real, is definitely not confusing at all. Right? Right?! Anyway, let’s go eat, huh?
Featured Image: Ctrl Shift Face