Actor and impressionist Jim Meskimen shows impressive skills impersonating famous celebrities, which combined with the latest deepfake AI technology creates shockingly convincing results.

Deepfake is the technology that allows to change the face of any person in an existing video footage with the face of someone else if there were enough photographic images of them shot from similar angles. Deepfake technology can be used to imitate once’s voice too, but that’s not needed if the actor did a good vocal job. That AI gimmick is getting more and more available to the general public and with the abundance of data we have of famous persons almost any face can be replaced with that of a celebrity.

In the following video by the YouTube user Sham00K you can see the original footage by Jim Meskimen and the result after the video manipulation:

It is a fascinating technology that can be used for both good and bad purposes. I can tag that article with both #humor and #horror at the same time. The bad sides you already know: creating a convincing photos or videos of someone that look like an evidence of them doing something they can be wrongly accused of. There are already such cases in the real world with harmful results to certain people. On the other side, the good purposes deepfake AI can be used for is in the VFX industry. It can take away the need to create complex 3D models to replace someone’s face with their younger version or to replace the face of a double with the real actor’s one. I am pretty sure this can work with much less effort for replacing parts of environments like facades of buildings so-so built on sound stages with those of the real buildings.

I don’t know about you, but to me it’s still the bad side of the technology that’s prevailing when I evaluate it.