Netflix Spanish Reality Show Deep Fake Love By Netflix
In theory, there isn't much to separate Deep Fake Love from Great Sex Experiment on Channel 4 or Casa Amor on Love Island on ITV. «The Great Sex Experiment» is about curious couples who venture into a luxurious hideout full of open-minded singles to see if an open relationship can strengthen their bond. Casa Amor is a villa next to Love Island's house of fun, where paired members split up to counter the tactics of seducing scantily clad newcomers. In both cases, the original couple's loyalty is questioned as one watches the other enjoy the stranger.
In Deep Fake Love, made for Netflix by Spanish company Cuarzo Producciones, five couples are separated into two separate houses with predatory loners. Each member of a couple watches videos of their partner kissing or having sex with someone else and must decide if what they are watching is real or ultra-realistic artificial intelligence technology, also known as a deepfake, showing things that actually happen. the case never happened.
Deep Fake Love has been described as «violent», «disturbing», «manipulative», and «outrageous». For cuckolds, the anguish of watching their partner kiss or lick someone else was clearly excruciating. There is no official word on the aftermath of the show, but a careful examination of the contestants' social media channels reveals that three of the four winning couples are no longer together.
This is a controversial technology for a number of reasons. As Cuarzo Producciones' promotional comparisons of fake and real images show, there's something frightening about real-life footage of a woman grumblingly rebuffing a man's advances into an ecstatic embrace. Is it a matter of consent? Or are we pushed away by a car reaching for it? When nothing happened in the real world, nothing really happened. But fake treason — it was impossible to unsee.
“I think people have no problem fixing the last few scenes in a movie if the actor dies during filming,” said Ed Waller, editor-in-chief of television bible C21 Media. “And most reality show producers consider Deep Fake Love to be a bit of a one-trick pony. Where we start to get moral issues is at the Hollywood agencies that own the rights to the deepfakes of dead actors. Since 2019, James Dean has starred in two films, Finding Jack and Return to Eden. Both struggled to reach the screen.»
The Screen Actors Guild has placed control of artificial intelligence at the center of its demands during the current Hollywood strike, fearing that digitized faces will put actors out of business. «Actors' salaries make up a large part of the cost of production, and any chance of having more control over them will be taken up by some producers,» says Tom Harrington of Enders Analysis. “The ability of established actors to play in any age range right now – Harrison Ford can just keep playing Indiana Jones from the underworld – will limit the leverage that actors have. Even though the number of applications is quite limited at the moment, the unions are right in trying to make the industry promising.”
As a foreign, cheaply produced and exploitative AI reality show, Deep Fake Love seems to represent every flamboyant actor's worst nightmare. So it looked like an incredibly unfortunate moment when Deep Fake Love Netflix host, as well as Disney, Sony and Amazon recently, in the midst of a strike, posted job ads for artificial intelligence experts, offering salaries up to $900,000, while the conference room a group from the Film and Television Producers Alliance categorically refrained from negotiations. Nearly 90% of the more than 170,000 Hollywood performers make less than $26,000 a year, according to SAG.
And yet, headline writers, SAG activists, and Twitter warriors like TheNerdySasquatch («It's bad when Netflix does it, it's bad when Disney does it. AI is somewhere near art and media. Pay your actors and writers”) seem to have rushed.
Not sure if I would have timed the release of this announcement to a highly paid AI job at Netflix in the current context of various strikes in the entertainment industry https://t.co/FcqVripdgV pic.twitter.com/vsB1Yo3KdA
– Andy Kirk | Data Visualization (@visualisingdata) July 25, 2023
Some jobs were clearly in Deep Fake Love territory—for example, the $300,000 Amazon Prime job description read: “Want to define the next big thing in content localization, content enhancement, or content accessibility with state-of-the-art generative AI. and computer vision technology? This is for you!”
In the case of many studios—particularly Netflix, which is rumored to be seeking a separate deal with unions—the AI’s work has been based on improving the algorithms that track viewers’ behavior so that it could predict future decisions.
As Devin Koldevi, a Silicon Valley journalist for TechCrunch, acknowledged, “If you read real job descriptions, you will see that none of them are really about content creation. This does not mean that Netflix is not working on generative content either. But these are jobs that we actually see in ads, and most of them are generic.”
So everyone can breathe a sigh of relief? Maybe. Probably no. The limitations of modern deepfake technology are significant, explains William Bartlett, executive creative director of VFX at Framestore. «Think of it like digital makeup — you can recreate a face, but you can't just put it on someone,» he explains. “An actor must speak and move like the person he is playing. If you want to fake Donald Trump, you have to portray an actor with Trump's looks who can make a good impression. Deepfake Meryl Streep can't win an Oscar because the actor is playing her face, not Meryl Streep.»
But what if Ana de Armas wasn't the star of the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde? What if Marilyn herself was? Will it make it more or less watchable?
Dead actors are cheap in the UK, where there is no legal protection for a person's image after death — unlike in the US, where people can own the rights to their life and image. In Britain, deepfakes of the dead are an ethical and legal no-man's-land — hence the experimental Virtual Maggie project from a group of scientists at the University of the West of England, which is trying to resurrect Margaret Thatcher to play herself in a film about her actions in Northern Ireland in 1989.
When Framestore created a deepfake version of the late queen for Channel 4 in 2020, it took several weeks to train the AI, and then several more weeks to sync the fake face and actor. The process is accelerating — there are currently deepfake online debates between Donald Trump and Joe Biden around the clock, where viewers can ask questions and usually receive obscene slurs that are too sloppy for a movie theater screen and won't fool anyone. More.
In the latest episode of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker's Netflix series, the episode «Joan is Terrible» features a woman whose life turns into a near-real-time deepfake TV show. With the brutality of a reality show producer, the show looks for the worst moments and amplifies them in a montage that makes her look… well, awful. In theory, we are not far from a crude version of what will become reality. Perhaps soon your smart TV's algorithm will be able to present ads with you as the star.
Annie Murphy in Black Mirror episode Joan is Terrible Credit: Netflix
“We can do deepfakes live — we have a guy on the team whose face becomes the face of Tom Cruise live during a Zoom call — but that would only be convincing on the phone,” explains Bartlett. «We're probably close to the stage where AI can personalize content for you, using your Facebook photo reads to put you and your friends in a commercial or short film.»
And then maybe you could do your own movie, matching your face with Marlon Brando or Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris. Imagine your partner's face when he sees this. Or imagine your partner's face involved in this scene. Suddenly you're in Deep Fake Love and you don't even have a chance to win €100,000.
«Artificial intelligence won't stop improving and disappear,» Bartlett warns. “Actors are the first to recognize a threat, but if a computer uses your face in footage, for example, nobody owns the copyright. If you scan yourself into generative AI to make a funny picture, that data will never disappear. Anyone can do anything with it. We need to set some goals and structure legally, because right now the law is far behind the technology.”
And if this seems like technical nonsense to hide strikers’ grievances, and deepfakes are actually the future of entertainment, then casting «Crowns» will be much easier. Whatever you think of the show, imagine the difference when watching the computer-generated facial reconstructions of members of the royal family as they re-enact, say, the late queen's death in the upcoming final season. What would you prefer? Actors or machine?
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