Most celebrities are filled with dread whenever deepfakes are mentioned, mainly due to the porn they have unknowingly starred in. Bruce Willis on the other hand, seems to have embraced the technology in return for cold hard cash.
As Russia Beyond reports (via IGN), a deepfake of Bruce Willis is set to be used for a series of 15 ads in Russia. The ads are for local mobile network MegaFon and will see fake Bruce reprise his role as John McClane from Die Hard while speaking perfect Russian, of course. In return, real Bruce gets to stay at home in the US and receive compensation thought to be in the region of $1-2 million.
Here's deepfake Bruce in action:
Vasili Bolshakov, Director for Brand and Marketing Communications at MegaFon, explained that the version of Bruce Willis used in the ads, "will be created with the help of the face generation technology, which is based on neural network algorithms. To make this happen, the engineers of the Deepfake studio selected a large volume of photos and videos featuring the celebrity. They had 34,000 units of content which were used by the neural network to create the image of Bruce Willis’ character."
In each of the 15 ads, Willis plays the experienced secret agent and the other role is a novice agent played by different actors. The situations these agents are placed in will be solved using "life-hacks and ingenuity."
The use of deepfakes has until fairly recently been frowned upon, but they are increasingly being turned to in Hollywood to create younger versions of actors. Now it seems ads are also fair game, especially with the pandemic limiting where actors can travel.