Ah, Game of Thrones. It’s been a month since the show has concluded, but it appears as though people are having a slightly hard time letting go; the show is still all that everyone seems to talk about!
The 8th and final season of the show aired earlier this year, and it was received with everything besides praise. In fact, it sparked so much anger and backlash that over a million people signed a petition demanding a remake of the last season of the show they had been following for so long. People had a lot to say about how it ended, and the aura surrounding it overall was simply just not pleasant.
In response to all this backlash, a video has been circulating of actor Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow on the show, in which he is apologizing for Season 8.
https://www.instagram.com/p/By5YjbanW3c/
The video opens with Jon Snow announcing that “it’s time for some apologies”, and proceeding to say sorry for the viewers’ wasted time.
He also apologized for the fact that showrunners didn’t learn anything from the ending of Lost, and pointed out that he had more lines in the 50-second clip than he had in the entirety of the last season.
He then stated that he knew that nothing made sense in the end, and the writers’ mistakes were evident in the fact that the tiniest mistake they made was the Starbucks cup that they accidentally left in one of the scenes.
Jon Snow then apologizes for the showrunners having written the show in such a short time, confirming fans’ claims that it must’ve been written in ‘6 days or something’.
The video ends with the characters gathering together to burn the script of season 8, putting it behind them ‘forever’.
The video quickly became viral, and you too can watch the whole thing here:
Interestingly enough, the video is fake – deepfake, to be exact.
The viral video has been altered to deceive viewers, by ‘deepfake.’ What’s deepfake, you ask? Well, Wikipedia describes it as “a technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique known as generative adversarial network.”
Deepfakes are essentially just videos that mimic a person that isn’t really in the video, using artificial intelligence. So you can technically put words in a celebrity’s mouth and make it seem like they said something when they really didn’t. Anyone, anywhere can download a software and twist a video into something entirely different than what it initially is, just by typing in a couple of words. And that’s nothing but dangerous.
Deepfakes are becoming more and more realistic as technology advances, and there are loads of videos circulating the internet, some of which include one of Kim Kardashian and Mark Zuckerberg.
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByKg-uKlP4C/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
While the video of Kim is her telling viewers that she loves manipulating people, Mark’s video caused huge discomfort amongst people when it came out, because it implied that he was intending to harm consumers, and made it seem that he said he ‘controlled the world’ with all the data he had collected through Facebook and Instagram….it’s crazy.
The reason why deepfake is so dangerous is simply that you can make anyone look like they’re doing or saying anything – no matter how ridiculous, harmful, disrespectful or inappropriate it may be.
There have been cases of misinformation spreading through this tool, and matters have gotten as serious with the creation of revenge porn and alteration of political statements on behalf of leaders. In an era where people turn to social media and digital content as their primary source of information, being able to edit videos as simply as one can edit pictures can lead to problematic amounts of conspiracy, political misinformation, and possibly even war. Fake news is a big problem today, and endorsing it as such would only make things worse.
This does raise questions about what such technological advances could be used for, and that’s definitely a cause for concern. For now, as far as Jon Snow and Season 8 is concerned, this video isn’t real.
What do you think about this? Let us know in the comments!
