Lucasfilm hires YouTuber who deepfaked Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian

A recent Star Wars deepfake on YouTube was so good that Lucasfilm has hired the talent behind the VFX video.

Spoiler alert: The season 2 finale of The Mandalorian on Disney+ saw a Jedi arrive to take Grogu (aka Baby Yoda). But not just any Jedi: A young Luke Skywalker. However, some viewers weren't impressed by the visual effects. Determined to correct the last few minutes of the show and de-age Mark Hamill in a more releastic way, a YouTuber known as Shamook published a deepfake in December that has earned nearly three million views.

Shamook's work is so convincing that it earned him a new job at Lucasfilm's visual effects division, Industrial Light and Magic.

"As some of you may already know, I joined ILM/Lucasfilms a few months ago and haven't had the time to work on any new YouTube content," Shamook wrote in the comments of a recent video. "Now I've settled into my job, uploads should start increasing again. They'll still be slow, but hopefully not months apart."

Lucasfilm confirmed the new hire, telling IndieWire: "[Industrial Light and Magic is] always on the lookout for talented artists and have in fact hired the artist that goes by the online persona Shamook. In another comment on YouTube, Shamook revealed their new job title is a "Senior Facial Capture Artist".

Deepfake videos use artificial intelligence to make it appear as though someone is doing or saying something they never did. Pocket-lint has a guide that details how the technology works. In a statement to the media, Lucasfilm said ILM has been investing in both machine learning and AI in recent years in order to "produce compelling visual effects work and it's been terrific to see momentum building in this space as the technology advances".

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