Roughly a year-and-a-half ago, attendees at a film festival in Amsterdam watched a speech by then-President Richard Nixon memorializing astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, wistfully confirming they had been fatally stranded on the moon during the 1969 Apollo flight.
The speech was actually written for Nixon as a backup but never delivered because the astronauts in fact weren’t stranded. The video, created by MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, was meant to underscore the potentially powerful influence of so-called deepfakes.