I've always found these Trek deepfakes to be an interesting curiosity and this one with Shatner in place of Jeffrey Hunter in the Cage is the same way: It does give insight into how distinctly he played Kirk with his body language and mannerisms given that even with Shatner's face this obviously feels so unlike him.
This doesn’t work for me given the body language and voice are not Shatner’s. To some extent “The Gamesters Of Triskelion” is Kirk’s revisit of “The Cage” story.
Hunter's hairline and color with Shatner' face is a bit jarring. Plus a weird five o'clock shadow thing happening with the sideburns.
Now there's a peppermint patty I'd do anything for... Should have been Peter Tork instead. That way, when season 2 came about and Chekov came in with his Davy Jones wig, they could win over the Romulans via go-go dancing contests...
There are still telltale artifacts, but it's admittedly very clever and the latest revision puts what was done in "Rogue One" to shame, and that was downright impressive too. My guess is that they're using bitmapping using scaling to simulate the three dimensions, and relative shading to match. Pure guesswork aside, some of the camera angles were downright impressive.
The hair, the body language, the voice, were all Jeff Hunter. Truth be told, it took me a while to even see that it was Shatner's face. Uh, what cut from Hunter to Mount? Where? Some DSC episode? Princess Leia in Rogue One somehow seemed . . . rubbery, for lack of a better term.
Well, they look better in somewhat limited circumstances at the moment. The main thing that the 3D modeling gets you a la Rogue One are things like subsurface scattering, which treats flesh as translucent and lets light interact with it more realistically than face replacement does currently, but as the AI gets better that's going to change.