Metastases
“A virtual Lena?” Zara thinks about it. “Possible,” she finally says. “In any case, there’s all kinds of celebrity porn. Porn where celebrity faces are superimposed on the bodies of the actors. It’s often cringe, but sometimes it’s really well done.”
“How do you know that?” asks Yasira, a little shocked, while her thoughts continue to race.
“Don’t be naive, mom. This is the shit my generation has to deal with all the time.”
Yasira realizes that she isn’t really listening to Zara. That’s how busy the new ideas are in her head.
“I gotta get to the office,” she says. “Do you want me to drop you off at school?”
“What?” asks Zara, as if her mother had suggested that she go to daycare today instead of school.
“I just thought because . . .”
“No offense, mom. But that would be really uncool.”
So Yasira just gives her somewhat embarrassed daughter a kiss on the head. “Love you. Take care of yourself.”
As soon as she gets to the office, Yasira immediately sits down at the computer and plows through all the information she can find about Mila.
The whole internet seems to be full of it.
Back in June 2018, she was already on Time’s list of the “25 Most Influential People on the Internet.” How did Yasira miss all of this?
And she’s not the only one—her whole generation seems to have missed it. The older folks, even more so.
The progress Mila has made in the few years of her existence is truly amazing.
While she looked very fake at the beginning, the latest pictures and videos are truly amazing.
One clip shows her playing a tag game with friends.
Yasira would never have doubted the authenticity of this recording. And why would she?
When Michael comes in and offers her a coffee, she just waves him away as if he were an annoying pet.
“Do you have a lead?” he asks immediately.
“Maybe,” says Yasira without looking at him. “Leave me alone. Later.”
Michael shrugs his shoulders, puts both coffee cups on his desk, turns on his computer and then stares out the window for a while.
Meanwhile, Yasira has expanded her search radius.
She has moved on from Mila and is looking for information about computer-generated images in general.
As her daughter said, there are already countless deepfakes.
It’s like a cancer. It first infected the internet and is now metastasizing into the real world.
Some of it is harmless. Benign, so to speak.
Stallone as Terminator, Jim Carrey in The Shining, Schwarzenegger in Sound of Music.
Olaf Scholz, who wants to ban the AfD. Boris Johnson encouraging people to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, only to reveal at the end that this video is a warning against deepfakes.
Yasira finds Elon Musk who, it seems, has found a new love: Mary Barra—the boss of General Motors.
Both Google and OpenAI have introduced video generators, Veo and Sora, which can create truly fascinating clips based on simple text input.
Photorealistic close-ups of people, puppies playing in the snow, a herd of mammoths in the mountains, “historical” footage of California during the Gold Rush, a panda playing the mandolin.
But not everything is so harmless. Yasira finds a website that advertises that you can use it to undress anyone in a picture.
You upload photos there, mark the clothes you want removed and the software immediately generates a so-called “deepnude.” Allegedly, the site has over a hundred thousand daily users.
As Zara said, there are countless porn videos where the faces of unsuspecting celebrities (or in the even more disgusting case, classmates) replace the faces of porn actresses.
And then, of course, there is the AfD, which shares fake photos of aggressive refugees, knowing that they are fakes, and even deliberately generates images to support its online agitation.
Yasira has heard about this, even though she paid little attention to the reports at the time.
Too little, she thinks now. The pictures are not particularly good, and anyone who looks closely can quickly identify them as fake.
But who looks closely? The AfD people are obviously amateurs.
They are “grateful for the new technology,” one of the guys said in an interview. AfD—amateur-faker-dorks.
But what if this time someone who really knows their way around deepfakes has taken up the cause?
Yasira’s eyes are burning. She squints them and blinks a few times.
Michael is still sitting across from her. He looks at her.
“So, are you going to tell me now?” he asks.
“Didn’t you bring me a cup of coffee?” asks Yasira.
Michael hands her the cup and says: “But it’s already cold.”
Yasira checks the clock. It’s almost noon. She has spent over two hours diving headfirst into the Deepfake Rabbit Hole. She takes a sip of the cold coffee.
“Do you want to grab lunch?” she asks, “Cafeteria?”
“Mustard eggs,” replies Michael.
It’s amazing how tenaciously cafeterias hang on to the past. They probably already had mustard eggs here in the days of the first telegraph battalion.
“You know what that means?” asks Michael.
Yasira nods. “Today is Pad Thai Day!”
That’s what Michael always calls it when they skip the canteen and go to the Thai restaurant around the corner.
“Correct!”
At the restaurant, Yasira tells her partner everything she has found out.
“Wait a minute,” Michael interrupts her at one point, his mouth full. “Are you telling me the video is fake?”
Yasira squirts some more lemon over her pad thai.
“I’m just saying it could be. That we haven’t investigated in that direction yet.”
“But Lena Palmer is not fake! She really has disappeared. We’ve talked to her father. You’re not saying she voluntarily took part in this video? That it’s staged?”
“No, try to understand! She wasn’t involved at all. I’m saying it could be that someone just used her pictures to generate this video.”
“But she’s really disappeared,” Michael shouts. He seems to be blocked.
“That’s what makes it so brilliant in a sick way!” exclaims Yasira. “Because Lena is real, because she’s disappeared for real, because they used the image of a real person, it didn’t even occur to us that the video could be fake.”
“I don’t know, Yasira. It seems very far-fetched to me. Why Lena?”
“Because her disappearance already made headlines!”
“But who would be behind this video?”
“Well, who benefits from it? Amateur Faker Dorks, perhaps. Or the Active Homeland-Protection! Bear and his buddies!”
Yasira takes out her phone and shows her partner the videos of the virtual influencer her daughter follows.
“This Mila doesn’t exist!” she exclaims, “Do you understand? Not an actress! Not a role model. Completely computer generated. Made by some nerds on behalf of some advertising jerks.”
“Crazy,” says Michael.
“Yes, gross. I’m not saying I’m definitely right about this, by the way,” says Yasira. “I’m just saying that it’s a path we haven’t looked into yet. And it’s possible.”
“But if you’re right,” says Michael thoughtfully. “Where does it end? How are we supposed to know what’s real and what’s fake?”