MIT researchers make Nixon’s deep-faked speech about Apollo 11 crash
Scientists at MIT have made a deep-fake video of the late US President Richard Nixon giving a speech about the crash of Apollo 11. The US government wrote the speech in case the moon landing failed.
The seven-minute film In Event of Moon Disaster is a combination of real images and new manipulated clips. The video starts with its launch in July 1969, which is successful. When landing on the moon, however, the mission goes wrong and the capsule starts spinning uncontrollably. This ends in a crash, after which Nixon’s speech begins. The speech was actually made by the government, but was never recorded by Nixon. Now, thanks to deep fake technology, MIT was able to pretend the speech was being delivered.
According to the scientists behind the project, the speech is a combination of ‘simple, deceptive editing’ and ‘more complex deepfake technology’. For Nixon’s voice, the scientists used an actor whose voice they synthetically distorted with the Respeecher software. To manipulate Nixon’s lips and mouth, they used Canny AI. With the film, the scientists want to investigate ‘the influences and ubiquity’ of deepfake technology in today’s society. They also want to show the danger of deepfakes.
The Canny AI software uses an ‘AI model’ that can recognize facial movements and then manages to manipulate them per frame. As for images, the researchers used Nixon’s resignation speech because it had the “right, serious, and gloomy tone.” Only the mouth has been adapted for the video, the rest of Nixon’s movements are still intact. The actor was filmed while recording, allowing the software to use his facial movements for Nixon’s expressions. For audio, the researchers used clips that Nixon recorded during the Vietnam War to synthesize Nixon’s voice through the Respeecher tool.
The researchers had previously posted the deepfake speech online; the longer video with images of the crash is new. The researchers chose Nixon’s speech because space travel is a widely loved topic, and not political, “in contrast to a lot of misinformation.” The researchers say it is abundantly clear that this is a fake video because the moon landing actually took place.
On the In Event of Moon Disaster site, the researchers provide more information about deepfakes and how people can recognize them. For the film, the researchers collaborated with, among others, the Mozilla Foundation and Scientific American.