A faked video of Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg talking like a technological tyrant will not be taken down, according to a report first published by Vice Tuesday.

The very realistic video that appeared on Instagram has the Facebook boss saying things in line with the criticism that has been showered on him from far and wide over the last few years. The quality of the fake is excellent, and unsettling.

“Imagine this for a second,” Zuckerberg says, or doesn’t say, in the opening. “One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures. I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data, controls the future.”

ดูโพสต์นี้บน Instagram

Mark Zuckerberg reveals the truth about Facebook and who really owns the future… see more @sheffdocfest VDR technology by @cannyai #spectreknows #privacy #democracy #surveillancecapitalism #dataism #deepfake

โพสต์ที่แชร์โดย Bill Posters (@bill_posters_uk) เมื่อ มิ.ย. 7, 2019 เวลา 7:15am PDT

The video that had been tampered with was actually Zuckerberg talking about Russian bad actors using Facebook to influence American voters in 2017. That clip was seven minutes long in total. The manipulation that had Zuckerberg expressing his nefariousness and power was the work of British artists, Bill Posters and Daniel Howe. The creators added a subhead with the words, “Mark Zuckerberg reveals the truth about Facebook and who really owns the future.”

Those tricksters used dialogue replacement and video manipulation technology from the company Israeli-based CannyAI. Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump have also been used by the artists, which is all part of a U.K. art installation called Spectre. The installation states that it’s “poised to reveal the secrets of the Digital Influence Industry” and for people praying “at the altar of Dataism with the Gods of Silicon Valley.”

That installation, say the artists, is not just to leave well-known people with egg on their face but to show how various techniques can be used to influence the public and how social media can be used to manipulate voters. As for Zuckerberg featuring in the dystopian ensemble and being shared online, Facebook hasn’t yet taken the video down.

“We will treat this content the same way we treat all misinformation on Instagram,” a spokesperson for Instagram said in a statement. “If third-party fact-checkers mark it as false, we will filter it from Instagram’s recommendation surfaces like Explore and hashtag pages.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this year had a video of her faked, something which made her come across as being drunk. The video did eventually get removed, but Facebook which has refused to take it down reportedly had nothing to do with that. At the time Facebook was criticized for its nonaction, so with Zuckerberg now being the victim perhaps the company would look hypocritical if it were to react.

In fact, following the brouhaha relating to that fake, Facebook’s director of public policy, Neil Potts, told Congress and as well as lawmakers that Facebook would stick with the same policy even if a similarly manipulated video of Zuckerberg showed up on one of its platforms. Perhaps this is one of the reasons it happened. Apparently, Zuckerberg tried to talk to Pelosi about his company’s decision but she rebuffed his olive branch.

“For us it is the next step in our digital evolution where eventually each one of us could have a digital copy, a Universal Everlasting human,” CannyAI said in a statement about the video, adding a more positive spin. “This will change the way we share and tell stories, remember our loved ones and create content.”

The audio in the Zuckerberg fake was not the work of artificial intelligence but said to be an actor who does sound a little like the CEO but doesn’t quite get it right. Canny has said that to achieve the desired result it trained an AI algorithm to focus on a face during a 20- to 45-second scene for up to a day. The facial movements were then manipulated to match whatever dialogue they wanted.

Deep fake videos like these are nothing new, but so far it hasn’t been difficult to ascertain that you are watching the work of technological manipulation. In the Zuckerberg video it’s the voice that let the show down in terms of how realistic it is. The rest works.

It might not be too long, however, until perfect voice cloning becomes widely available. Only Monday, engineers at Facebook AI Research showed how they could perfectly reproduce Microsoft Corp. Bill Gates’ voice. This didn’t involve any actors, but a machine learning technology called MelNet that analyses the many shifts in tone of a person when they are speaking and then clones that voice.

It would be unrealistic to believe software that creates the perfect video clone is not around the corner.

Photo: Spectre