Data gets deepfake for Star Trek: Picard and it’s wild

Deepfakes are a controversial topic but when used to improve beloved media, they have a unique value as you’ll see with this Star Trek: Picard video.

If you’re unfamiliar with deepfakes, essentially it’s a way for a person to digitally impose the face of someone over the face of someone else in a very real, life-like looking fashion. It’s caused many concerns with the possibility of what technology could do, including falsely accusing people of heinous crimes. It’s a scray piece of technology, yet in the right hands can be a beautiful piece as well. Especially for Star Trek fans.

YouTube user Deep Homage recently showcased the power of the technology with Star Trek: Picard and iconic Trek character Data. Data is an android so he shouldn’t age. Yet, the character is played by Brent Spiner, who is very much flesh and blood, so he does age. Deep Homage attempted to apply deepfake technology to turn back the clock on Data to make him look 20 years younger.

And it worked.

The process for making deepfakes is quite tedious, as TrekMovie.com reveals.

"According to Deep Homage, it takes at least a week to train the computer model to re-create the swapped face, and then the images are converted back into a video with the model and edited in a video editor. For the above video 5,000 images of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation were used, along with 2,000 images from Star Trek: Picard."

This type of technology isn’t new, but the method may be. Movies like Bruce Willis’ Looper incorporated a similar technique, by overlaying a young-Bruce Willis over the actual face of Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

We’ve even seen this be used in Star Wars as well, with the recreations of Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia in Star Wars: Rogue One, as well as de-aging Mark Hamil for his role in The Mandalorian.

It’s an expensive and time-consuming process, however, so it’s not always a guarantee to work and look good.