According to reporting by The Telegraph, Bruce Willis has become the first living Hollywood actor to sell their rights to allow a "digital twin" to be used - and monetized - on screen. The buyer, a US firm not-so-cleverly called Deepcake, has already used its form of deepfake tech to render the 67 year old actor's digital twin in a phone ad last year for Russian telecom provider MegaFon. Calling it a "digital twin" may sound like they've got the actor's whole body in store, but really it's just the usual case of transplanting their face onto another actor's.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            "I liked the precision of my character. It's a great opportunity for me to go back in time. The neural network was trained on content of 'Die Hard' and 'Fifth Element', so my character is similar to the images of that time," Willis said. It's not the first time deepfake adjacent tech has cropped up in movies. One ill-fated production planned to digitally resurrect the long dead actor and Hollywood legend James Dean, to plenty of backlash. Similarly, James Earl Jones, the iconic voice of Darth Vader, allowed for his deep baritones to be imitated by an AI, and you can bet that Disney will be taking advantage of that for endless sequels and reboots to come. But for the sake of both actors and moviegoers: let's not have our stars replaced by lifeless reconstructions.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        -bu FRANK LANDYMORE  - Futurism