Deep Fakes
He sent the video clips and the speech that he'd prepared for her to the service. It was only $49. They were running a special this Christmas; one deep fake with the words of your choice said by the person of your choosing. He did it because he missed her. The only reason he’d even heard of this was because someone at work had showed him this clip of that famous Israeli actress saying she liked to munch pussy. The one that had blown up about a year ago and no matter what she did no one believed that wasn’t her until a forensic analyst came forward and pointed out some of the problems and the people who were still paying attention at that point exonerated her, while the rest of the world thought she was a bit of a lesbian, which wasn’t the worst thing when you were trying to continue to land roles in action movies into your late thirties. But, anyhow, because the guy who had showed him this video was something of a connoisseur of this phenomenon he took the time to point out to him how nothing in the video made it look like this whole thing had been composited and post-processed by an AI. After the net had got sick of pasting Nicholas Cage and Nick Offerman’s face onto everything, they moved on, and all the while they were getting better, so by this point they were practically indistinguishable from reality. They moved on to rewriting history, from the Moon Landings, to Jonestown, to the Holocaust. Some black nationalists who got really good at it started filming enough realistic looking clips of Malcom X in the White House that it had by this point moved from being just a line in a song to a movement. He sent them the material on Sunday night and by Monday morning when he woke up he already had the file waiting in his inbox. It was two minutes long. She apologized for everything she had said after she walked out. She asked for him back. She said she didn’t mean it when she said he didn’t get her. She told him she loved him, and she asked him to consider if he’d ever have her back. He liked what they had done with it. He felt not like the pathetic psycho he had pictured feeling like. He felt empowered. He liked to see himself considering his response.