Have deepfakes got talent?

The participants in last week's final of TV show America's Got Talent included a Lebanese dance troupe, a pole dancer, the singer from Hootie & the Blowfish and… two tech entrepreneurs who "build Artificial Intelligence tools and software to create hyper-realistic synthetic media at scale", according to their social media biographies. Tom Graham and Chris Umé are the emerging godfathers of so-called deepfake technology, a mind-bending illusion by which a person in a video is digitally altered so they appear to be someone else. Thus the America's Got Talent final saw four largely unknown singers line up on stage and, thanks to futuristic AI trickery embedded in the cameras in front of them, become deepfake versions of Elvis Presley and judges Simon Cowell, Heidi Klum and Sofía Vergara on the big screen behind them. This all happened in real time, as if the extraordinarily lifelike quartet were singing Devil in Disguise live on stage. Cowell, Klum and Vergara (the real versions) looked on with mouths agape from their judges' seats in the stalls.