My final video above is only 38 seconds long, but I needed to gather a lot more footage-of both Zuckberg and Data-for training. I also needed a heap of images of both Mark Zuckerberg and Mr. Advertisementįurther Reading How computers got shockingly good at recognizing images Along the way, I'll explain how the underlying technology works and explore some of its limitations. I'll explain each step required to create a deepfake video. In this article I'll take you with me on my deepfake journey. And there's every reason to think deepfake technology will continue to get better, faster, and cheaper in the coming years. Still, what's remarkable is that a neophyte like me can create fairly convincing video so quickly and for so little money. It doesn't quite capture the full details of Data's face, and if you look closely you can see some artifacts around the edges.

I started with a video of Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress and replaced his face with that of Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner) from Star Trek: The Next Generation. A couple of weeks later, I have my result, which you can see above. My Ars overlords gave me a few days to play around with deepfake software and a $1,000 cloud computing budget. I thought the best way to answer these questions would be to create a deepfake of my own. Instead, in classic Ars Technica fashion, I'm going to take a close look at the technology itself: how does deepfake software work? How hard is it to use-and how good are the results? Many good articles have been written about the important social and political implications of this trend. The technology has obvious potential for abuse and is becoming ever more widely accessible. Deepfake technology uses deep neural networks to convincingly replace one face with another in a video.

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