[imagesource: TikTok / Unreal Keanu Reeves]
Far too many people have been fooled by a Keanu Reeves deepfake doing the rounds.
Everything about him seems real, except for those beady eyes and the fact that the TikTok account holder does offer a disclaimer in the profile bio.
The account is literally called “Unreal Keanu Reeves” and the bio reads “Parody, Life and Enternal [sic] youth”.
As Futurism notes, the truth is somewhere between “unreal” and “parody” with only a handful of people catching on that this actor is in fact a deepfake:
…while dressed in everything from sweats to suits, the phony star convincingly references his famous movies rolls, dances, and cracks jokes about lowering the toilet seat lid in order to appease women.
The deepfake character is getting a lot of love, having already racked up 7,5 million followers and 35,2 million likes at the time of writing:
@unreal_keanu Life with a girlfriend. #keanureeves #relationship #girlfriend ♬ original sound – Unreal Keanu Reeves
To be honest, I was fooled on one of my doomscroll sessions. I thought the famous actor is really good at keeping a straight face and squatting really low.
I am relieved to find that I am not alone in this confusion:
Though the account doesn’t itself clarify what tech it used to build the digital Keanu mask, some users think that it was made using Unreal Engine 5, a sophisticated game engine by Epic Games.
Unreal Keanu Reeves is just another addition to the ever-growing lineup of deeply unsettling celeb deepfakes (a fake Tom Cruise also popped up a while ago). Keanu should have expected this treatment at some stage thanks to his role in The Matrix.
While this Keanu doesn’t seem to be using his account to spread dangerous disinformation, others have.
A while back, a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling people to surrender from the war with Russia was widely shared online.
And then you have videos like that real girl acting and moving around like a virtual NPC – which stands for a non-playable character in a video game – really throw a spanner in the works here.
[source:futurism]
