Back in 2017, the Justice League movie had to go into unscheduled reshoots when Joss Whedon took over for Zack Snyder. Unfortunately, they had a problem in the shape of Superman¡¯s mustache.
By the time reshoots began, Henry Cavill had already grown the facial hair for his next role in Mission Impossible 6. There wasn¡¯t time for him to shave it off for Justice League and grow it back again, so the decision was made to just digitally edit it out. But as it turns out, a simple AI program seems to do a much better job than millions of dollars worth of CGI.
In the video, someone has repurposed the now infamous ¡°deepfakes¡± app for a more wholesome purpose. Instead of attempting to make fake porn of Gal Gadot, they instead trained the AI on Henry Cavill¡¯s clean-shaven mug, and then swapped that onto various footage of the actor, both from justice League and elsewhere. As you can see, the results are pretty damn good, though it definitely helps that the faces being swapped are both almost the same.?
So, you may think that the CGI on Justice League did a good job of removing Cavill¡¯s facial hair, so why would you need AI? For one thing, the deepfakes app works out a heck of a lot cheaper as far as editing goes. It¡¯s unclear just how much Warner Bros. spent on just Cavill¡¯s mustache, but it¡¯s definitely more than the $500 price of the mid-range PC used here (as well as the free app and just half a day of tweaking it).?
Yes, we do have to worry about all the nefarious ways this kind of technology can be used. It¡¯s home on Reddit turned into a cesspool of non-consensual pornography, before the site finally banned the subreddit just yesterday. But what we need to do is frame better laws to deal with those situations instead of blanket bombing the technology itself. And eventually, it might just change the way Hollywood movies are made.