Celebrity deepfakes are coming to advertising.
Among the recent entries: Last year, Russian telecommunications company MegaFon released a commercial in which a simulacrum of Hollywood legend
Bruce Willis
helps defuse a bomb.
And last month a promotional video for machine-learning firm Paperspace Co. showed talking semblances of the actors
Tom Cruise
and Leonardo DiCaprio.
None of these celebrities ever spent a moment filming these campaigns. In the cases of Messrs. Musk, Cruise and DiCaprio, they never even agreed to endorse the companies in question.
All the videos of digital simulations were created with so-called deepfake technology, which uses computer-generated renditions to make the Hollywood and business notables say and do things they never actually said or did.
Some of the ads are broad parodies, and the meshing of the digital to the analog in the best of cases…
This article was written by and originally published on www.wsj.com