COLUMBIA
JOURNALISM
REVIEW
SPRING
2021:
S imon
V.Z.
W ood 6 9
Avatars of Anxiety Falling into the deepfake-industrial complex
by Simon V.Z. Wood Illustration by Sam Mason
I
n February 2020, there was an unsung development in the realm of dystopian technology, upon the release of the music video for the Strokes song “Bad Decisions.” The video begins with a shot of a woman, bored at home, who amuses herself by pushing a button that allows her to clone the Strokes. The clones proceed to sing “Bad Decisions” until their heads fall off and the song ends. In the YouTube comments, some viewers remarked that Julian Casablancas, the frontman, looked more showered than usual. Others observed that the song sounded remarkably similar to Billy Idol’s 1981 hit “Dancing with Myself.” It does. So much so that Idol is credited as a writer on the track. Which makes sense when
you consider that Idol wrote “Dancing with Myself ” after playing a mirror-filled Japanese discotheque in which people danced with their own reflections. It makes even more sense when you consider that, while all five members of the Strokes starred in the video, none of them acted in it. It happened like this: A production company called Invisible Inc hired five actors who kind of looked like the Strokes and filmed them performing “Bad Decisions.” Invisible Inc then sent a bunch of old video footage of the actual Strokes to a guy from Canada who calls himself The Fakening. The Fakening proceeded to junk the old stuff, pull better clips he found on YouTube, train a machine-learning algorithm on the faces of the real band, and digitally
