We Will Deep-Fake It For You Wholesale

Will AI Deep-Fake technology destroy the internet as we know it?

I recently spent a glorious few hours rewatching Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 masterpiece Total Recall. I love almost everything about Total Recall. I love the soundtrack, the special effects, Sharon Stone, and how spectacularly over the top it all is. For youngsters, Total Recall is a futuristic Sci-Fi action film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger receives a brain implant that creates a reality that he’s a secret agent on a mission to save the people of Mars from an evil corporate overlord. However, the treatment goes wrong, and he ends up living and experiencing it for real - or does he?

Based on Philip K Dick’s We Will Remember It For You Wholesale, the film induces a feeling of epistemic uncertainty within the audience. Are you in the dream, or is it ‘‘real’’? Like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and to a lesser degree The Matrix, Verhoeven’s film leaves the audience in a state of confusion and wonderment, questioning the nature of reality.

Such philosophical pondering entered my mind over the last week, as I found myself listening to full-time liberal and part-time actress Emma Watson reading passages from Mein Kampf and Rishi Sunak announcing plans to end multiculturalism and send all the immigrants back home. I found it more believable that Emma Watson would be reading the words of Adolf Hitler on the Jewish Question than that the Tories would do something about immigration, but as I’m sure you’ve realized by now, both were AI fakes.

Japanese people can now watch Total Recall, and they get to see Arnie mouthing perfectly in Japanese phrases such as ‘‘See you at the party, Richter!’’ or ‘‘Get your ass to Mars’’.