Fifty-one years ago Monday, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation to celebrate man’s first steps on the moon.
The landing was a success, but what would have happened if something had gone wrong? What would Nixon’s Oval Office broadcast have been like?
Since Apollo 11′s astronauts – Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – landed safely on the moon and returned to Earth, we can only imagine the message Nixon would have delivered that night.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took imagination a step further and created a video to show how that speech could have looked had it happened.
The video, called “In Event of Moon Disaster,” is a project of MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, and is aimed at educating the public about deepfakes – or videos that are made to appear as if a person is saying something he or she did not say.
The name “deepfakes” comes from the use of deep learning technology, a branch of machine learning that allows for the simulation of events.
MIT’s video uses images from the Apollo 11 mission to lead up to the deepfake video of Nixon’s speech, set in the Oval Office.
While the video is a product of the imagination, Nixon’s speech was not. The text is real, written by White House speechwriter William Safire in the event that something went wrong with the Apollo 11 mission and Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the moon.
The video was produced to warn of the potential for misinformation in an age where creating such material is becoming easier, said D. Fox Harrell, professor of digital media and artificial intelligence at MIT, and director of the Center for Advanced Virtuality.
“Media misinformation is a longstanding phenomenon, but, exacerbated by deepfake technologies and the ease of disseminating content online, it’s become a crucial issue of our time.”
“In Event of Moon Disaster” was first released in fall 2019 and won the Special Jury Prize for Digital Storytelling at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. It was released Monday to the public on the anniversary of the moon landing as a warning, researchers said.
“This alternative history shows how new technologies can obfuscate the truth around us, encouraging our audience to think carefully about the media they encounter daily,” Francesca Panetta, project co-lead and XR Creative Director at MIT Virtuality said.
Cox Media Group
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