Well friends, it's been fun but it seems the end of civilization is officially here: Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a flat Earther.
Okay, not really. But our AI overlords have gotten so good at deepfakes there's now a video of DeGrasse Tyson saying he's become a flat Earther that is indistinguishable from the real DeGrasse Tyson.
DeGrasse Tyson used the video to open up his most recent episode of his StarTalk YouTube series to show just how terrifyingly far AI deepfakes have come.
In the video, the completely indistinguishable AI DeGrasse Tyson says:
"Lately, I've been doing calculations as well as looking back at old NASA footage and raw data from satellites hovering above Earth."
"And I just can't escape the conclusion that the Earth might actually be flat."
Music to the ears of conspiracy theory weirdos everywhere but utter nonsense in reality, of course.
After announcing his supposed "flat Earth" epiphany, the real DeGrasse Tyson then pulled his phone back from the screen to reveal the whole thing was, thankfully, a deepfake.
But the implications are truly terrifying. We live in a world so steeped in propaganda and disinformation—"flat Earth" conspiracy theories included—that the ramifications of deepfakes this convincing are deeply alarming.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
DeGrasse Tyson went on to say that even his close personal friends have been fooled by deepfakes of him saying nonsense.
He described an incident in which the actor Terry Crews sent him a clip of himself saying something untrue and he had to correcct his friend that it was not, in fact, him speaking.
In the rest of the StarTalk episode, DeGrasse Tyson was joined by Alex Cosoi, Chief Security Strategist at Bitdefender, who explained the dangers further, citing examples like multimillion dollars in Hong Kong and deepfake videos of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin having conversations that never happened.
For now, AI-detection apps and software still do a pretty good job of detecting deepfakes.
But with the advent of things like OpenAI's Sora, sophisticated deepfakes for social media are now flooding our feeds—often fooling even the most eagle-eyed viewers.
Cosoi says it's likely only a matter of time before such apps no longer really matter.
"I believe that there may be a day when a deepfake is going to be more appealing to a person, even though a protection tool will tell him that's fake."
And that's... kind of already happening. The number of completely fake Sora-generated social media clips that have gone insanely viral since it launched just a month ago is proof of that.
On social media, people were shocked and alarmed by DeGrasse Tyson's deepfake.
Sure wish we had an actual government that cared about literally anything and would regulate this stuff! Oh well. Maybe the AI bot we elect president in 2028 will do something about it.
@sama/X
