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87 Def. Counsel J. 1 (2020)
Face/off: "DeepFake" Face Swaps and Privacy Laws

handle is hein.journals/defcon87 and id is 19 raw text is: Face/Off: DeepFake Face Swaps and Privacy Laws By: Erik Gerstner Erik Gerstner is an associate at David, Kamp & Frank, L.L.C. in Newport News, Virginia. Erik received his JD from William & Mary Law School in 2018. He focuses his practice on civil litigation, including business litigation, real estate, personal injury, and reputational injury. This article has been expanded from one the author published in For The Defense. N 2018, a curious trend spread rapidly across the Internet: people posting videos of Nicholas Cage's performances in various Hollywood films.1 To the uninitiated viewer, these videos might appear to be nothing special, just various facets of Cage's prolific career. However, closer inspection would reveal a subtler thread running throughout these clips: none of these performances actually involved Cage. Rather, thanks to relatively new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software programs colloquially known as DeepFakes, Internet users had seamlessly inserted Cage's face over the faces of the original actors in these scenes, 1 John Maher, This was the year of the deepfake Nicolas Cage meme, THE DAILY DoT (Dec. 27, 2018), available at making it appear as though Cage had always portrayed those characters.2 Nicholas Cage's central role in DeepFake videos is fitting, given his starring role alongside John Travolta in 1997's Face/Off, a film in which his and Travolta's characters both end up wearing the other's faces throughout the film. Although it was only a fanciful Hollywood invention in 1997, face swapping technology entered the mainstream in 2017. In August of that year, University of Washington researchers released a video, seemingly of Barack Obama, discussing topics such as terrorism, fatherhood, and job creation, which had been created using machine https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/nicolas -cage-memes-deepfakes-2 018. 2 Id.