A new deepfake puts Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the pilot episode of the original Star Trek,
“The Cage” — and I kind of love it. In this particular AI-powered face
swap, Bezos plays a Talosian alien with a huge bald head, while Musk
plays Captain Christopher Pike (who is the captain of the USS Enterprise
before James T. Kirk).
Here’s a very short version of what’s going on in this
scene, if you’re wondering: in this episode, the Talosian aliens capture
Pike to enslave him and use him to breed humans that will be used to
rebuild a destroyed society. Pike tries to escape throughout the
episode, and eventually, the Talosians decide that humans’ resistance to
captivity won’t make them a good fit for that plan.
The conversation is kind of hard to follow, and that’s
probably because the clips from the episode are stitched together to
make it seem like it’s only the Talosian alien and Captain Pike having a
conversation. In the actual episode, there are a number of other
characters who are critical to the conversation that this deepfake
doesn’t show.
But even though the scene is confusing, I think the
deepfake is scarily impressive, particularly the unsettling-looking
Bezos as a Talosian alien. It “marks” the second Star Trek cameo for the Amazon CEO: he appeared in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, also as a big-headed alien.
Jay Peters
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