Synthetic Celebrity: Cloning A Billion Digital Selves For Fun And Profit

Synthetic Celebrity: Cloning A Billion Digital Selves For Fun And Profit

A man in a colorized, synthesized environment.



Photo by Imani Bahati on Unsplash

Imagine a soccer fan creating the next Ronaldo viral video. A basketball fan building Lebron's newest social media campaign. Or a Miley Cyrus fan inventing her next influencer marketing project.

Sounds like fiction?

It might not be, if one of the most successful deepfakes-for-fun video platforms manages to come through on its plans to build a massive platform for celebrity multiplication: real celebrities participating in thousands, millions, or even billions of complete customized ads, interactions, or engagements with fans, and synthetic humans created for commercialization doing the same.

The platform is Reface, one of the biggest deepfake apps on the planet.

After catching fire last year — including growing from 10,000 to three million daily active users in just six weeks — the company has been building new technology to enable near-infinite content personalization using celebrities' faces and bodies.



And not just celebrities: potentially every human being on the planet.

“You can use Cristiano's face and you'll be part of the story, for example, for the Nike and Cristiano ads,” cofounder Dima Shvets told me in a recent TechFirst