'Deep Fake Love' Is Netflix's Stanford Prison Experiment

There's a special place in hell for reality dating show creators. In this realm, enterprising producers contemplate the emotional damage (and psychological torture!) they gifted their unsuspecting contestants. That said, everyone involved in Netflix's Deep Fake Love—a competition series where participants watch potentially deepfaked videos of their significant other cheating on them—already have their own little corner in the underworld.

Jokes aside, I can't overstate this enough: Deep Fake Love is one of the most evil television series I have ever witnessed.

And I absolutely love it.

Ever since Netflix entered the dating show game, the streamer has been sinking deeper and deeper into the moral gray. Too Hot to Handle initially seemed like it delivered deserved punishment, but its premise goes to shit once the group realizes they don't actually care about the money. Love Is Blind simply becomes 90 Day Fiancé halfway through its run, forgetting what it was trying to prove in the first place. The Ultimatum was Netflix's first true dive into the shadows. Much like MTV's Temptation Island—which Deep Fake Love also takes inspiration from—a show that begins with pre-established couples has so much more possibilities for drama. Though the controversy surrounding Deep Fake Love has yet to hit the United States, the Spanish-language dating show (which debuted this July) is already causing a stir in Spain over whether reality TV has finally gone too far.

Here's the gist: five pre-established couples—who are looking to "test their relationship"—split up and live in two separate villas. Throughout the show, miscellaneous hot singles enter the picture. They flirt with the contestants and try and get them to either cheat on their partner, or simply land in a compromising position. These singles—or "demons," as I call them—are not contestants. They are paid actors and skilled manipulators. During the experiment, the contestants watch videos of their partners cheating on them, which are either real or staged with body doubles and deepfaked A.I. images. It's up to the contestants to decide if each video is real or fake, with 100,000 euros going to the couple that collectively identifies the most videos correctly.

I've watched Deep Fake Love with a few people. Their response? Well, they walk away from the television. I guess it takes a twisted mind like mine to enjoy such destructive content, but I was blown away with how giddily Deep Fake Love tortured its subjects. Countless jokes have already been made about the dating-show genre functioning as tiny social experiments. How would a person react if X awful thing happened to them? Usually, not very well! But I've never seen so many contestants openly wish that they hadn't participated in a show while it was still filming. Still... I couldn't look away.

Though most reality dating shows claim to be searching for miraculous love stories in the face of ridiculous tests, everyone knows why we're all really here. It's schadenfreude to the highest degree. It's a train wreck that just keeps crashing, even with the power to brake at any point. Complete emotional collapse of this magnitude has rarely been seen on reality television, and Deep Fake Love is a supercharged magnet for it.

Usually, it's enough to say that the contestants have essentially done this to themselves. It's tough to indulge in the misery of others when you witness a real tragedy, of course, but it's so much easier to consume when you know that the pain is self-inflicted. Like any reality dating show, Deep Fake Love found participants who appear to have been in healthy relationships for at least several years. Eventually, we learn that they're all blind to their toxic relationships, hypocritical actions, and double standards. You would think just locking yourself in a room for the entire experience would keep you faithful, but the very nature of the deepfaked videos ensures that everyone has an awful time.

There's a reason why the world is so afraid of artificial intelligence. It seems all too easy to fake these videos, and even easier to believe that what you're viewing is real. Deep Fake Love even tricked me on multiple occasions. But even if you correctly guess every deepfaked clip as fiction, those images stay in your brain. It's like having a dream about your partner cheating on you—then, in the morning, you wake up feeling angry at them. Many contestants tell the host directly that seeing the fake videos has greatly complicated their relationship beyond repair, even when they find out which ones were deepfaked.

Because of Deep Fake Love's moral controversy, we may never get a second season—or even a U.S. version. Hell, we may never see a show like this again. But that just makes the experiment all the more intriguing. "Deep Fake Love is the most wildly immoral unethical reality show i ever seen 😭 … but idk I hope they keep making it," one Twitter user wrote. "Technologically of this caliber should not exist," another user chimed in. It's tough. As the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes fight against A.I., Netflix is using that very same technology to to tear relationships apart for our enjoyment. There may be nothing more diabolically dystopian than that.

You Might Also Like

• Kid Cudi Is All Right

• 16 Best Shoe Organizers For Storing and Displaying Your Kicks