An interesting article on how the deepfake of Nixon reading the “moon landing has failed speech” was created:

Inside the strange new world of being a deepfake actor

The process requires an actor to basically be a “puppet” for the final product, akin to motion capture. With current technology, both the appearance and the voice of the actor can be transformed into those of someone completely different. The line that jumped out at me:

The actor, in other words, serves as a puppeteer, never to be seen in the final product. The person’s appearance, gender, age, and ethnicity don’t really matter.

Huh. Pay attention to that, Hollywood. Here is how you can make non-insulting historical epics and still hope to win an Academy Award. Recall the new diversity rules for Oscar contenders:

STANDARD A:  ON-SCREEN REPRESENTATION, THEMES AND NARRATIVES
To achieve Standard A, the film must meet ONE of the following criteria:

A1. Lead or significant supporting actors

At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.

• • • Asian
      • Hispanic/Latinx
      • Black/African American
      • Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native
      • Middle Eastern/North African
      • Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
      • Other underrepresented race or ethnicity

Huh. Well, folks, here’s your loophole. Let’s say you want to make a Viking saga, or something from Shakespeare or something about King Arthur or Peter the Great or Charlemagne or the Thirty Years War or Leonardo da Vinci or… whatever. but you’re pretty sure it’ll be an Oscar contender. What to do? Simple: hire, say, Idris Elba to play King Arthur and Viola Davis to play Lancelot and Salma Hayek to play Morgana and Hari Kondabolu to play Merlin. And then replace them in post: John Wayne as Arthur, Cary Grant as Lancelot, Marilyn Monroe as Morgana and Richard Harris as Merlin. You have, in fact, done what the Academy standards wanted you to do, and yet you’ve also made a reasonably accurate version of the flick.

As the technology improves, the argument for using real – and real expensive – actors to portray their un-deepfaked selves will get weaker and weaker. The world is full to overflowing with perfectly good actors who can portray anyone… they just don’t look the part. Now they won’t need to. We could soon enter an era where “acting” and “appearance” become wholly separate commodities. Actors might be known by name, but not by face. And regular schmoes with no acting chops whatsoever could make a good bit of extra cash by selling the rights to their appearance… go into a booth, strip down to your skivvies (or further, for extra cash) and you are 3D scanned to ridiculously high precision. Perhaps even X-rayed or sonogramed to get the skeleton right. Takes ten minutes and you’re back out onto the street. A year later you get a letter telling you that, hey presto, you’ll be portraying Darth Blarg in Star Wars Episode 15, The Sith Cash Grab. Two years later the checks start rolling in… a few tens of thousands for use in the movie, a few more tens of thousands for all the posters and T-shirts and action figures that use your likeness. Not a lot of money by current Hollywood standards, but all you did was stand there and strike a few poses for a few minutes.