People online thought reposting a clip of Elon Musk singing a Soviet song about space explorers was a perfect way to celebrate the historic launch by SpaceX. It’s actually a deepfake video from two weeks ago, and it looks stellar!
A Russian deepfake artist has superimposed the face of the tech entrepreneur on the footage from a live show by Soviet band “Zemlyane” (or “Earthlings”) back in 1983. In the clip, Musk ‘replaced’ the lead singer, who was performing a song called “Trava u doma” (“The grass beside the house”).
The genre of the song is described as space rock. It tells a touching story of a cosmonaut in orbit, who looks at Earth from the viewing port, is missing his planet and, while sleeping, has dreams about the “green-green grass” outside his home.
Here’s the original clip from Zemlyane’s show:
Musk, obviously, never sang Soviet space songs, but he surely sang the praise of Russia’s space program. Last year, he tweeted that “Russia has excellent rocket engineering & best engine currently flying,” predicting success to the upcoming Angara rocket.
Elon Musk has been the hero in numerous deepfake videos, in which AI technologies are used to seamlessly replace the face of a person in the footage with the facial movements of somebody else.
On Saturday, SpaceX became the first private company to deliver NASA astronauts into orbit, while also carrying out the first manned space launch from US territory in nine years.
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has congratulated SpaceX on its first manned launch, saying that the success of the mission will benefit the whole international space program.
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