Filed firmly under ‘Things we did not see coming in 2021’, the rise of the celebrity doppelgänger is taking TikTok by storm. Who knew that celebrities, including Kylie Jenner it would seem, have so many long-lost twins floating about?
That’s right, Kylie Jenner is the latest celebrity to have an online lookalike and – let me tell you – this one is seriously convincing. TikTok user @kjdrafts has amassed over 4 million likes after posting just 13 videos of herself. It’s easy to see why she’s gone viral – she’s literally the spitting image of the Kylie Beauty mogul.
She joins a whole host of celebrity doppelgängers who’ve been taking over TikTok lately, from Amanda Seyfried to Cardi B, and Blake Lively to Scarlett Johansson. Here she is in action…
Yep, she looks like Kylie alright. Fans have been commenting their disbelief all over her videos, with one writing, “Looks more like the original Kylie than Kylie”, and another adding, “I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
However, many TikTok users have also pointed out that this one may just be too good to be true. One person commented, “I FIGURED IT OUT GUYS.. It’s the reface app where she records her regular self then puts Kylie’s face,” while another added, “I can’t believe there’s people believing this isn’t a deepfake when it glitches all the time.”
A ‘deepfake’ refers to an image or video, which has been created using ‘deep learning’ (a form of artificial intelligence) and depicts a ‘fake’ event, or person.
According to a Deeptrace report in 2019 (via Vox), 96% of deepfakes were of women (mostly celebrities) and that 96% are pornographic and nonconsensual.
We don’t know if Kylie Jenner’s lookalike is a deepfake, although there are plenty of signs to support this theory, such as the fact the TikTok user never moves her hand over her face (which would temporarily remove any filters), there are glitches around her eyebrows and lips, and she only does a few facial expressions.
GLAMOUR spoke to Wael AbdAlmageed, Research Director at USC Information Sciences Institute and Research Associate Professor of USC Electrical and Computer Engineering, whose research examines multimedia forensics and visual misinformation (including deepfake and image manipulation detection), to find out how you can spot deepfakes on TikTok.
How does deepfake technology work?
“Deepfakes are “fake” videos of someone saying or doing something they never said or did, created using a “deep” neural network; hence, the name deepfake. Deepfakes methods can replace the entire face in a given video with that of a victim/target person (such as a celebrity) and also can only reenact the lip movements and facial expression of a celebrity in a given video.”
Why are deepfakes dangerous?
“Deepfakes are dangerous because they show a victim saying or doing something they never did before. The majority of existing deepfakes to date have been used for shaming women and celebrities (such as revenge porn), and also for spreading misinformation and political unrest (such as making a politician say something s/he never said before). It could also be used to destabilise democracies and crash stock markets.”
How can you spot deepfakes on TikTok?
- Slow down the video and look for unrealistic or inconsistent eye and lip movements and facial expressions
- Examine the consistency of the skin tone between the face and other body parts (hands for example)
- Examine the consistency of shadows and skin colour between different people in the scene
- Look for semantically unrealistic facial features (for example one green eye and one blue eye)
For more from Glamour UK’s Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.