Are we fucking the first time were together?🥰
A deepfake video and audio combination of Joe Rogan was created by Dessa to raise awareness about the potential misuse of AI technology to distort the truth.
- Incident date
- May 2026
- Target
- Joe Rogan
In early 2019, pioneering machine learning experts at Dessa created a deepfake of Joe Rogan, combining both audio and video synthesis. The company stated the goal was to raise public awareness of the power and potential danger of artificial intelligence.
What happened
The deepfake video, featured in The New York Times' online series The Weekly, starts with audio of "Joe Fauxgan" introducing himself as an AI. The video portion begins around 27 seconds in, with Rogan's digital doppelganger stating that he'll conclude his podcast on its ten-year anniversary. The voice and face are swapped with a real person. Dessa used the same RealTalk model they developed to recreate Joe Rogan’s voice with AI. The final dataset their machine learning engineers used to replicate Rogan’s voice consists of eight hours of clean audio and transcript data. Dessa co-founder stated that they would not be releasing the model, code, or data used in the video to mitigate the risk of misuse.