How 'Yellowjackets' deepfaked MTV News anchor Kurt Loder in a haunting ad for season 2

• "Yellowjackets," a thriller series with a cult following, had its season two premier on Friday.
• Showtime created a promo for the new season featuring a haunting deepfake video of MTV's Kurt Loder.

In a haunting new ad for season two of Showtime's thriller series "Yellowjackets," a de-aged Kurt Loder returns to his iconic 90's "MTV News" desk to report on the fictional soccer team's disappearance.

The deepfake video, created using a combination of AI technology and hand-created composites, shows the famous host — now 77 years old — replaying the news of the characters' mysterious disappearance while appearing exactly as he did more than 30 years ago.

Steve Isaacs, a former MTV VJ turned executive vice president of Legion Creative, the company that made the ad for Showtime, told Insider the goal of the deepfake was to play on the unsettling and possibly paranormal themes of the show, making viewers feel like "time and space is eating itself."

"The concept was this could be a TV commercial and, for folks that were really not expecting it, all of a sudden you would hear 'I'm Kurt Loder, this is MTV News,'" Isaacs said, enthusiastically mimicking the iconic intro theme song to the show. "My dream was that people would leave the TV on and all of a sudden go 'Wait, what is even happening?'"

Loder told Insider the process for the shoot was "not much of a story." The host dressed in clothes he wore during his time on the show, Isaacs said, and read the report straight to camera, just as he would have during filming of "MTV News."

"Showtime got in touch, explained their idea for a deepfake mock promo, asked if I'd like to do it, and we went into a studio and shot it," Loder told Insider via email. "All the interesting stuff was done in post."

From start to finish, creating the of deepfake Kurt Loder took a team of visual effects artists, computer programmers, sound engineers and machine learning experts about three months to create, Isaacs told Insider — including a full month to create a data set mapping out Loder's face, allowing programmers to make him appear as he did in the '90s, and a team of sound designers reworking his voice to add back in the deep baritone notes that had been lost with age.

"I think there's about 20 editors, sound designers, static designers — there's a lot of people that went into this, so I would say that I, personally, was surprised by it's not magical, just add water and some computer code and then voilà, you've got this thing," Isaacs told Insider. There's a lot of focus on details and a lot of artisans worked really hard."

"Yellowjackets" follows the fictional story of a high school girls' soccer team as they take a doomed flight via private plane to a national competition. The plane crashes and some inexplicable — perhaps supernatural — events begin to occur. With dual timelines showing how the girls survived and live in the future, the mysterious thriller is inspired by "Lord of the Flies," star Melanie Lynskey told NPR.

The show, which takes place in timelines in 1996 and 2021, is a "1990s nostalgia trip," according to CNN. And Kurt Loder's appearance in the campaign is right at home with that feeling, fans say.

On YouTube, viewers praised Loder's appearance in the "Yellowjackets" ad, saying it "takes me right back to my childhood!"

"This is the kind of AI I can get behind. Brilliant!" one Twitter user wrote.

"I loved MTV news! It was my only source back then!" another added.

While the audience response has been largely positive, some have drawn attention to the "weird" technology known for falling into the "uncanny valley" — too realistic to be cute, but not so realistic that it's totally convincing. Deepfake videos, which can be used to make people appear to say or do things they didn't in reality, have historically faced controversial responses, especially among privacy experts but, given new applications in digital media and marketing, are becoming more normalized.

"The deep fake technology — while certainly adding a level of intrigue — was in this case a means to an end — a tool to create a quirky echo from a time in culture that many of us still remember fondly," Michael Engleman, Showtime's CMO, said in a statement emailed to Insider, adding that the tech was used "as transparently as possible" in an effort to make a "piece of video in which we're all — creators and viewers alike — in on the illusion together."

Isaacs told Insider that, with regard to deepfake technology in general he is "terrified on a certain level," and understands some viewers' hesitations about the approach, but "this was this was a beautiful scenario where we're really paying tribute to someone and wanted to bring them physically back, and then add some technology to try to give people the feeling of hopefully what they got from Kurt back in the day."

He added: "Virtual reality and artificial intelligence seem like, every five to 10 years, there's a new cycle and something big happens but this last four or five months since Chat GPT, Dall-E and Midjourney everything exponentially just went into like a speed tunnel of development. I have to imagine like, you know, it's March right now — in a year, the conversation around AI is going to be completely different."