The internet wants to see Nicolas Cage in every movie imaginable.
Software that had so far been used for the troubling purpose of inserting faces of movie stars onto pornographic material has lent itself to a humorous internet sensation. People have been using an artificial intelligence tool to insert Cage’s face into numerous movies, with bizarre and often hilarious results.
Due to the prodiguous skill of internet denizens, Cage has made his way into films as James Bond and Indiana Jones, among others, through a Reddit thread.
Cage’s face has also been morphed onto Andy Samberg’s during a Saturday Night Live skit which also has the real Nicolas Cage, just in case someone wanted to see two Nicolas Cage’s in one frame.
With regard to the movies that Nicolas Cage actually appeared in, the Academy Award-winning actor was last seen in action thriller Mandy, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 19.
This is a hilarious detour of a more troubling recent trend, of imposing celebrity images on pornographic clips. Motherboard had first reported in December about a Redditor identified as deepfakes who has made such clips of several actresses, using “open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning”.
A report in Wired said that there is very little legal recourse available in the United States of America against face-swap software. The report explains that US legislation criminalises nonconsensual porn – a person’s nude photos or clips used as pornographic content without permission – but it cannot do anything in cases where a celebrities face is morphed into an existing adult video, because it is not their body in question.
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