Deepfake by Joseph S. Klapach

Deepfake by Joseph S. Klapach

I doubt you will believe me. Still, I have proof. You will find the files on my hard drive. And I will tell you exactly what happened. I have nothing to hide.

Let me begin with how we met. I studied communications and video production at the University of Cincinnati. After graduation, I landed a coveted position as a production assistant with the WKRC news team. But my dream job quickly devolved into a nightmare. For two miserable years, I sat in the production booth next to Meredith Nicholson. She was a demon disguised as an angel. Petite. Delicate features. Singsong voice. But it was all an act. Beneath her alluring exterior, Meredith was cold and calculating and conniving. There was nothing I could do that she could not do better, and she never ceased letting everyone know it. Instead of encouraging me, she ridiculed me. Instead of teaching me, she exploited my inexperience to make her own star shine brighter. She exposed my every misstep. She highlighted my every flaw and imperfection. Can you imagine what it is like to endure such torment?

Six months ago, I reached my breaking point. We were airing an innocuous special interest segment about the start of the new school year. It was pure pap. Interviews with teachers preparing their classrooms. Adorable children lamenting the end of summer.

Meredith’s voice rang out in the booth.

“Alan, there’s a typo in the chyron.”

“Oh God, she’s right.” The producer shouted. “It says: ‘Back Two School.’ T-W-O.”

“I’ll fix it.” I replied, but in my haste, I made another error.

“Not T-O-O.” The sound technician piled on. “It’s T-O.”

I was mortified. I scrambled to rewrite the chyron again.

Meredith snickered.

“He’s gotten it wrong two times.” She blurted. “T-W-O.” But Meredith wasn’t finished. “Maybe Alan’s the one who needs to go back to school.”  

The entire booth exploded in raucous laughter.

Something inside me snapped. I could not bear the humiliation any longer. I lunged across the control board at her. In that moment, I wanted to wring her neck. The producer and sound technician pulled me away. She wasn’t injured. I didn’t even touch her. But my career was over. WKRC fired and blacklisted me. I applied for jobs at stations across the country. I couldn’t land a single interview. The word had gotten out. I was unemployable.  

For a while, I felt lost. I had a highly specialized set of skills but no outlet in which to express them. I took a job as a barista to pay the bills. On weekends, I did some freelance editing. It was mostly wedding and bar mitzvah videos. I could feel my mind atrophy.

Then, one day, I got into a disagreement with another one of the baristas. He claimed that Emma Watson had made a sex tape and tried to show it to me. I laughed in his face. It was an obvious fraud. In the video, Emma Watson’s head wobbled ridiculously on top of another woman’s body. The lout was offended. I had spoiled his fantasy. He turned his anger upon me. “If you’re so smart,” he scoffed, “why don’t you make a better one?”

I suppose I accepted the challenge out of boredom. Perhaps it was the urge to flex once more the muscles I had worked so hard to develop. Or perhaps it was the need to prove I had more talent than this dreck. In any event, I fixed the monstrosity. A single night of post-production dramatically improved the tape’s quality. I understand the video still circulates widely in the seedier corners of the web. It has tens of millions of views.

And that is how I became a purveyor of synthetic media. Deepfakes aren’t especially hard to make. Any gamer with a mid-range GPU can do it. The software is readily available, and the net is flooded with trillions of zettabytes of source video and images. All you need is a few minutes of footage of the target. The software does the grunt work. It breaks down the source and destination video into frames; it extracts facial landmarks; it feeds the aligned source and target faces through an encoder-decoder network; and it converts the source’s input face into the target’s generated face. That’s all it takes to create a simple face swap.

But making a good deepfake? Now that is another matter entirely. The human eye is difficult to deceive. It detects unnatural motion. It seizes upon inconsistencies in color or position. To create a deepfake that can pass for reality requires patience and skill. For each frame, you must incrementally adjust the color correction, the mask position, the mask size, and the mask feather. You’ve got to do FX compositing. There’s motion tracking. Shadow filtering. Repopulating lost pixels. It’s hours of painstaking drudgery on details that are nearly indetectable in the finished product. Making a good deepfake requires more than software. It requires an artist.

I set up shop on the dark web. For a price, I would create anything for anyone. It was high-end, custom work. I had only two rules. The first was that my clients had to provide at least five minutes of high-resolution video of the target. The second was that I chose the source video. My clients could tell me what type of video they wanted, but I retained full artistic control. It was the only way I could ensure my creations would meet my exacting standards for quality. You see, the secret to making a good deepfake is proximity. The closer the skin tone, the lighting, and the facial size and position, the better the final product. It was non-negotiable. I maintained absolute discretion over the selection and matching of the source. I was the one who decided what the target would do and with whom.

My newfound career was immensely profitable. I learned quickly that the human appetite for fantasy is insatiable. We are never content with what we have. We always strive to possess the unattainable. Of course, nearly all my commissions were sex tapes. Celebrities. Colleagues. Teachers. Cousins. There were no limits to my clients’ depravity. I am not too proud to admit that feeding their unquenchable lust paid for my apartment and car.  

Then, two weeks ago, I saw the first video. It was posted anonymously on a Dream Market forum popular with developers. The subject line caught my attention: “Why is Alan stalking me?” There was no further text, only a video attachment. My curiosity got the better of me. I clicked on the file. The video was black and white with grainy resolution. It appeared to be footage from a security camera. I recognized the location immediately. It was the lobby of the WKRC studios. The elevator doors opened, and there stood Meredith Nicholson. I cannot tell you the surprise I felt seeing her, for I had not thought about her in months. She was still petite. Still delicate. Ah, but the mask was falling off. She looked pensive. Troubled. In the video, she got off the elevator, glanced around nervously, and exited the building. But the shock of seeing Meredith paled in comparison to what came next. Out of the shadows near a column in the corner of the lobby emerged a man. I gasped at the sight of him. He looked exactly like me. My doppelganger followed Meredith across the lobby and out of view.

I sat for several minutes in stunned silence. It was impossible. The video depicted an event that had never occurred. I hadn’t been to the WKRC studios since I was fired. I hadn’t been anywhere near Meredith in months. It had to be a fake, but it was a fiendishly clever fake. There were no obvious incongruities in the proportions, postures, or movements. Only through careful examination was I able to identify how it might have been so convincingly fabricated. Even then, my analysis was far from definitive. The inherent blurriness of the security footage made it impossible to inspect the close details of my doppelganger’s eyes, face, and skin, which is where one can usually detect the tell-tale signs of artifice.

The post troubled me greatly. I knew only one person who could create a deepfake of such superb quality. Meredith was sending me a message. Somehow, despite all my precautions, she had discovered my new vocation. She was taunting me. She wanted me to know, even now, after everything that had happened, she was still better than me. I replied to her post. “Leave me alone.” I typed. “Haven’t you already ruined my life?” I received no response.

A week later, a second post appeared on the same forum. The subject line read: “Is Alan two incompetent to finish the job?” The post contained another video attachment. This one was footage from what appeared to be a bank’s ATM machine. Meredith stood facing my doppelganger on a street not far from the WKRC studios. Her arm was extended, and she held some unidentifiable object in her hand, which she pointed at my double. I could see her lips move, but there was no audio accompaniment. My doppelganger also held something in his hand, which he was pointing back at Meredith. I could see his lips move, but, again, I could not discern the words.

It was another brilliant deepfake. There were no visible inconsistencies in the movement or proportions. The faces were nearer to the camera than the first video and had been rendered more vividly. I concluded that Meredith’s face and body were real. A streetlight shone directly upon her and clearly illuminated her features. By contrast, my doppelganger stood in a faint shadow. I suspected this positioning was intentional, for the combination of the poor lighting and the slight fuzziness of the video quality obscured the pixels that comprised my doppelganger’s face. Meredith must have recorded the source video using a stand-in with a similar body type and then swapped my face from preexisting video.

But these observations raised an alarming question. How had Meredith obtained the target footage of me? There was only one possible explanation. She must have surreptitiously recorded me while we worked side by side at WKRC. I was filled with a profound sense of unease. I had always assumed Meredith viewed me as a competitor. I thought she mocked and ridiculed me to further her professional ambitions. I believed she monitored me to curry favor with our superiors. But what if I had been mistaken about her motivations? What if Meredith’s cruel attention was like that of an immature schoolboy who pulls on the pigtails of the girl sitting in front of him? What if Meredith’s true motivation was love, not hate, and she simply lacked the emotional awareness to express her feelings appropriately?

Meredith’s forum posts confirmed my hypothesis. In the first post, Meredith accused me of stalking her, yet I had not seen her for many months. It was classic projection. After secretly observing me for two years at WKRC, Meredith had re-framed our relationship in her mind. Unable to handle my rejection, she had convinced herself that I was stalking her when, in fact, exactly the opposite was true. In the second post, Meredith subconsciously invited me to contact her. She dared me to find her and “finish the job.” Plainly, she felt a latent desire to see me again. She had even tried to provoke me with a clumsy jibe about the chyron mistake which led to my termination.

Then, there were the videos themselves. Meredith must have spent hundreds of hours creating these superlative deepfakes. I had initially perceived them as taunts, but they were, in fact, twisted love letters. Everything began to make sense. All this time, Meredith had been obsessed with me, and I hadn’t realized it. I chose not to respond to Meredith’s second post. I did not wish to pour any more fuel upon the fire.

Alas, Meredith refused to let the matter lie. Yesterday, she posted a third message. The subject line read: “Confession is good for the soul.” The attachment featured a video of my doppelganger sitting in a police interrogation room like this one. The video was in color and of the highest resolution. My doppelganger spoke directly into the camera. His shirt was bloodied and torn. He said: “I am not ashamed of what I have done. I think she wanted it to happen. It was either her or me. So, yes, I killed Meredith Nicholson. I had no choice.”

I was filled with sharply conflicting emotions.

My first reaction was that of the deepest admiration. The video was a deepfake masterpiece. It was a closeup of my doppelganger’s face, yet the details were perfect. The facial expressions, the proportions, the lips, the movements. Everything was flawless. I pored over the video pixel by pixel. Not even the most skilled examiner would have been able to determine that it was a fake.

My second reaction, which followed from the first, was abject horror. While I had correctly deduced that the first two videos were the product of Meredith’s misguided infatuation, there was no escaping the sinister implications of the third one. Meredith had become deeply unstable. She was contemplating suicide. What’s more, in a final, vindictive act against me, she intended to frame me for her murder.

I considered my alternatives. I could approach the police and plead my innocence, but Meredith’s deepfakes were too perfect. I feared that while I sat in this police station trying to convince you what was really happening, Meredith would take her own life, and you would leap to the very conclusion she desired. I had no option but to confront her. I had to hope I could somehow get through to her and persuade her to abandon her sadistic plan.

Fortunately, Meredith had given me an idea. I did not know where she lived, but I knew where she worked. I made my way to the WKRC studios. I joined a crowd of employees returning from lunch and slipped into the ground floor restrooms without the security guard noticing me. I hid in a bathroom stall and waited until the close of business. Once I knew the security guard had gone for the day, I snuck out of the bathroom and concealed myself behind a column at the far end of the lobby.

Around midnight, Meredith came down the elevator. She had just finished post-production on the eleven o’clock news. She headed for the exit, and I followed her. The street was empty. I could see her walking toward the Metro station at the end of the block. I came up a few paces behind her, and she turned warily at the sound of my footsteps.

“Meredith.” I called out.

“You stay away, Alan.” She answered. “You’re violating the restraining order.”

I held up my phone and started recording her. I was hoping she would say something to prove my innocence. She aimed a cannister of pepper spray at me. I could not help but notice she carried a small pocketknife in her other hand.

“You contacted me.” I said. “You made those fake videos to frame me for murder.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just want you to leave me alone.”

“Then stop sending me videos.”

“You’re delusional.” She said. “I never sent you anything.”

“I have the videos.” I replied. “It’s obvious you spent weeks on them. And you spent years spying on me. Recording me without my consent.”

“Look, Alan, I have never felt the same way about you as you felt about me.” She said. “We were co-workers. That’s all. You need to accept reality.”

There was a pause in the conversation. We stood face to face under a streetlight, glaring at each other. After a few seconds, she turned her head slightly. I could see the flicker of thought in her eyes, so I was ready when she whirled suddenly and raced down the block toward the Metro station. I chased after her and snatched at one of her arms. She spun halfway around but slipped away and darted down a nearby alley. I followed her. It was a dead end. When she realized it, she turned back toward me. I approached her with my hands in the air. I wasn’t trying to scare her. I only wanted to talk.

“You’re not going to get away with killing yourself and pinning it on me. They’ll be able to prove those videos are fakes. They’ll know you committed suicide.”

“Please, Alan.” It was a pathetic mix of a cry and a whine. “Don’t do this.”

“You can’t kill yourself out of spite.” I said. “I know you don’t want to die.” 

I couldn’t have predicted her reaction. You must understand. She charged me. She gave no indication. She just charged me. She fired the pepper spray in my face and jabbed at me with her pocketknife. She flailed like a woman possessed. My eyes burned. I couldn’t see a thing. I managed to reach through the flurry of her arms and wrap my hands around her throat. I begged her to stop, but she kept stabbing me in the side with the knife. Over and over. I was helpless. Exposed. In fear of my life. And then she stopped moving. I can think of nothing further to say in my defense. I am not ashamed of what I have done. I think she wanted it to happen. It was either her or me. So, yes, I killed Meredith Nicholson. I had no choice.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Joseph S. Klapach 2024