In the eyes of the majority of people, deepfake is mainly used for public entertainment, such as spoofing friends or celebrities, interpreting film roles, etc. We can harvest a lot of joy from these deepfake videos, However, a few recent cases make people feel that deepfake can still have such a heart-shaking power.
Searching for Witnesses With Deepfake
In 2003, a boy named Sedar Soares was shot dead, while throwing snowballs with friends in the parking lot of a Rotterdam metro station. For almost two decades, Dutch police were unsuccessful in solving the case.
With the permission of Soares’ family, the police reopened the investigation recently and made a deepfake video in which the teen asks the public to help solve his cold-case crime. In what Dutch police believed could be a world-first, they had received dozens of leads after this deepfake video was released.
This was obviously very positive feedback. Without this technology, we might never have thought there would be such a way to help solve crimes, and we have to admit that—What is a better way to do that than to let Sedar and his family do the talking? It works to hit witnesses and the perpetrator in the heart!
Maybe shortly, We know better and better how cold cases can be solved.
A life-like image of Soares appears in the minute-long video as he greets the camera and picks up a soccer ball.
In Honor of the Martyrs With Deepfake
To celebrate Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers in 2021, the IDF Band partnered with a company specializing in deepfake technology, making the old photographs from the First Middle East War realistic again.
The team used the photos to create a video in which the young singer held an instrument, singing an iconic song honoring soldiers killed in battle. As they sang, they stared at the faded black-and-white photo they held in their hands. The young soldier in the old photo winked and smiled at them. At that moment, history and reality seemed to be linked together.
In fact, the desire to revive the past vividly is not new. In 2018, director Peter Jackson painstakingly restored and colored footage from World War I while directing the film “They Shall Not Grow Old”. This presented the audience with an immersive and extremely realistic immersive war experience.
Achieving a realistic reenactment of history is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. While deepfake technology makes such efforts available to a wider audience by providing an inexpensive, widespread tool. Even restoring or recreating war scenes with AI technology is becoming easier to achieve.
Conclusion
Deepfake can make history vividly come to reality, making the ‘dead’ past come alive and vibrant. If this lifelike past can inspire public compassion and nostalgia for the departed, or even assist the police in solving crimes. We can say without hesitation that deepfake technology provides a very powerful force behind it.
