UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography
Curated by Douglas McCulloh
Lies are ever-present in human affairs, a tidal flow that rises and falls. Recently, lies have been at flood stage and photographs are central to the surge.
Statements, strings of words, are readily seen as assertions, claims. Photographs, on the other hand, are presumed to be a form of evidence. In Susan Sontag’s phrase, we assume photographs are “directly stenciled off the real.” Consequently, photographs, even dubious ones, carry credence in a way that words do not. Moreover, writes theorist Lev Manovich, “the reason we think that computer graphics technology has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.” For these main reasons and scores of lesser ones, photographs are ideal vehicles for lies. (Read More)
Deepfake is a portmanteau word—the mating of two word-ideas: “deep learning” and “fake.” To underline the obvious, photographic lying through digital means is well-established. Deepfakes, though, are the dark glossy frontier. They use the power of high-end processing, the tools of artificial intelligence, and machine learning to generate visual imagery with a high (and growing) potential to deceive.
The Claim
The photograph shows a baby with an uncanny resemblance to Elon Musk.
The Lie
A weirdly Musk-like baby seems possible, though unlikely (and for the baby, unfortunate). Such an Elongate baby becomes less plausible when the image is a still frame from a video of the Musk baby giggling on a swing. Even harder to believe when the video—modified from an original titled “Cutest Baby Montage Ever”—shows 15 different baby clips and every wriggling baby looks uncannily like Elon Musk.
In fact, the Elon babies are a deepfake project of Paul Shales operating under the name The Fakening. Every baby has been Muskified. Shales has also inserted Jeff Bezos as a huge-headed Talosian alien into a classic 1965 Star Trek episode and grafted Donald Trump’s face and wince-inducing mannerisms onto a troupe of squalling, strutting little girls.
