This 1,000%. If anyone's struggling with social media addiction, doom scrolling etc. and this little rabbit hole intrigues you, keep going down it:
* Is that photo of a real person? Or is it filtered so heavily it no longer fits the definition of a photograph?
* Did nobody like my post? Or did the algorithm just not feel like showing it to anyone?
* Did that person decide to ignore me? Am I sure they're even who they claim to be? Did the platform arbitrarily decide not to show them my message, or did they get it at a bad time along with 50 others? Did they delete the app because they got sick of it?
* Am I really interacting with other humans? Or am I interacting with inhuman tools that are run by an entity who keeps its name out of the limelight and occasionally gives me morsels of human interaction to keep the ruse going?
Examine the Skinner box long enough and it will lose all of its power over you. You will switch off all of your notifications and delete all your social media apps and miss none of it. Your phone will sit in a drawer for most of the day. HN and Reddit are all that's left for me personally now (I deleted all the others), and I have a feeling the latter's days are numbered. The resulting void was quickly filled with better things. I started reading books again. And talking to nice people in public because it turns out humans are actually kind and friendly. And sunshine. Jesus, I'd forgotten how wonderful sunshine is.
Isn't this one of the necessary bridges to Meta's vision? The first steps are to kill authenticity and any aspect of defect - from there it is a gentle fall into the cosseted, synthetic alterplace of your choosing. It's all so strange and I feel lucky to generationally have escaped its pull.
I just don't know about that. If you go on Reddit during a major sports even there will be thousands of people posting to no one about their thoughts on the game in real time. "Great play!" along with 100 other comments on that particular play that no one is going to read or interact.
If you had AI bots like human posts then I really don't think the type of people that are into social media would care at all if a human is behind the like or not.
It is the very young now that I can see growing up being into something else besides social media but the current addicts are truly hopelessly addicted.
There aren't, that's the deeper point. Only cyborgs exist on the Internet, that's all there has been from the start.
At best you're interacting with a user agent, software that's animated largely by a human's will. Though most of the time you're interacting with an agent of, say, Meta Platforms. This agent impersonates the human you think you're interacting with, but isn't one, and ultimately just does whatever Meta tells it to. E.g. if Meta wants a post to vanish, then it does.
Even right now you're reading a post (mine) which was conceived of by a human, but you're not interacting with a human, you're interacting with a software layer run by YCombinator. I gave it permission to impersonate me, but the interaction is way different from unadulterated human to human contact.
The Internet has always been like this. The first user agents were simple so we didn't think about it much, but now these agents are becoming exponentially more complex so it's becoming more obvious that whatever you're dealing with is progressively less human.
We are so close to this reality. I made this TikTok video through a workflow of Stable Diffusion (Python), DeepCQ/Finclout, ElevnLabs, and Di-D. And if I with my limited ability can reach this level, someone with more able hands (and budget) can reach much higher levels of reality. Social as we know it is dead.
But then, if you look at TikTok it boils down to Boobs, Quizzes, and Twitter screenshots.
> And if I with my limited ability can reach this level, someone with more able hands (and budget) can reach much higher levels of reality.
So what?
People have been making fictional motion pictures for over 120 years. What does Peter Jackson's, or Spike Jonze's, or your ability to make a computer-generated person appear in a video have to do with 'social is dead'?
Are you concerned that people might make videos of things that aren't truthful? The film camera, and the radio have been lying to us for over a century. The written word has been lying to us even longer, and the spoken word since time immemorial. All of this... Isn't exactly a novel development.
Do you think that 'influencer media' was somehow a more authentic form of communication than those other forms of media? If so, why?
Once it becomes cheap enough to make indistinguishable fake online personas, there will be a flood of commercial, spam, and scam accounts that make it impossible to know who among your online connections is real and who isn’t.
It’s not about a cool looking ogre or background actor, it’s about a sudden inversion of signal:noise ratio for all online interactions
Obviously, you’ll still have your direct connections to people you know and trust to be real, and maybe some enjoyable “are they a bot??” interactions, but the social network experience that’s been around for the last 15 years will probably be over within the next 5.
> Once it becomes cheap enough to make indistinguishable fake online personas, there will be a flood of commercial, spam, and scam accounts that make it impossible to know who among your online connections is real and who isn’t.
Unless you have a personal, out-of-band relationship with that person, it has already been impossible to know that.
The difference to the last 120 years is that after the Internet brought the cost of distribution down to almost 0, now the cost to create clips and movies will follow along the same path. Why pay an actor/actress when you can now generate a human out of thin air ? Why pay for scripts when ChatGPT can just auto-generate something that is good enough for a 30 second clip?
I don't think that truthfulness or authenticity is the part that I am concerned about. Movies used to be a shared social experience. The more content is personalized we are losing this shared social experience which might lead to more isolation and conflict.
You don't see a difference between "someone with millions of dollars can do this in post-production" and "anyone can do this in real time, so you can't trust anything except in-person conversation to show you someone's face and voice"? Just because they might still lie at that point doesn't mean it's justified to go full nihilism and say difficulty doesn't matter.
All of those things have had extremely perverse incentives leading people to be dishonest for a long time, long before the internet in the case of photo/video (see Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch video). I don't see how AI tools have much impact. Most people knew this about AOL chatrooms in 1996. Does anyone actually think internet interactions are mostly authentic, or are you speaking on behalf of some imaginary clueless person?
The incentive was always there but now the cost is lower.
There have always been models and airbrushed photos, but most people quickly learn that Emily Ratajkowski is not going to return their texts and move on to real live human beings in their own cohort.
Now you make every average person into a model but only on TikTok, what happens? Probably more time spent on TikTok instead of face to face interactions with local people, at a minimum.
What happens to teenage girls when they see not just models but all their classmates rendered pretty by the machine and then compare their own reflection in the bathroom mirror?
Previously specifically real-time video was hard to forge, that tech was out of reach of a typical person who could not hire actors and do seamless real-time video composition.
Now thus has changed. The person you have just interacted with in a video call, with authentic human reactions, etc may as well be completely a visual fake, and have spent $0 to achieve that.
I suppose digital photos already have hard time to be admitted in court:i think most digital video coverage will soon also be inadmissible. I've heard of places where high-stakes security photo registration has switched back to chemical photography, exactly to make it demonstrably harder to forge, given that the footage us physically well-protected.
All around us gets more and more virtual, no matter whether we think, as consumers, it should be, or not. We'll have to deal with it.
Money is difficulty too. If fake video is ten dollars an hour, or one dollar an hour, that's a lot easier in practical terms than hiring an actor with high availability and a willingness to scam people.
If it's just speaking a preset text, yes. Doing a dialog in a way you specifically want, without a pre-made plot, is rather hard or impossible with an actor. Now you can put your brain behind a made-up face, in real time, for peanuts.
On IRC/AOL, you don’t see a face. But still, probably some real person did write what you read.
Until a few years ago, if I looked at the FB/IG/anything from a random person, I would assume most photos to be real, and most text to be really written by them. You could edit some photos and have some content ghost written, not everything.
Now a random person can fake everything. Would you still follow that “person”?
> I would assume most photos to be real, and most text to be really written by them. You could edit some photos and have some content ghost written, not everything.
Why does it matter to you if the text was written by them, or by a ghost-writer, or if they just regurgitated whatever their sponsor of the week wants them to say?
As soon as a profit motive's involved, you can't actually trust a media personality. It doesn't matter one whit to me whether it's an actual person shilling from a script, or if its an artificial person shilling from that same script.
i think most people care very little about authenticity. pretty much not at all. that's why this will have zero negative effect on social media. rather the opposite as it fits right into the contemporary value system.
tv shows, movies, games, youtube pranks, reaction videos, music clips, porn, ... almost nothing is real about those media products. why does it work? because it activates the right receptors in our brains and if necessary we just pretend those are real and authentic.
> You chat with people online because you think, you know, that people exist on the other side.
A fairly large portion of social networking isn’t so much “chatting with people” as “Finding an Us so that we can get together and yell at Them”, and in those cases the dehumanisation is a feature more than a bug...
It’s business and all business is show business baby! Look at all these great startups promising all these shiny things we so desperately need. I think it may be good advice to be wary of anything on the internet, or in the media. In a world so connected it’s amazing how disconnected we really are. For how fucked up everything is, we will need the fake reality being built. Just remember that the consumer demanded it, and that you must be nice and diverse to everyone and whatever.
I fully agree with you. Within the next 5-10 years the internet will be unusable to connect with real people anonymously because everything will be AI generated/enhanced and nobody can be sure whether they talk to a person or a computer.
While many are excited for that I worry about niche communities that hugely depend on the internet's ability to connect with like-minded people far away.
And so I keep a friend list that are really my friends and acquaintances on my Facebook.
I know when I'm talking to a friend that is really the person(no adding from online, only when face to face asking), and my online acquaintances from ye olde golden days are pretty locked in, and are currently good friends IRL too.
I immerse myself and build my own networks from physical contacts since. Now social medias is only a tool that can let me easily contact with them, and I have their phone number and email addresses as a backup.
I turn off every single setting I can find regarding content(ads, if you want) customization. I used FBP on my Facebook to automate that process too. I use firefox with uBo on my phone to filter the ads. Only Messenger Lite remains.
Now Facebook can't draw me into their death spiral of content bombarding anymore.
Social networks are bad for the reasons you outlined, but where you are wrong is that we'll actualize this understanding of fakeness into abandoning social networks.
We've had fake faces forever. Make-up is a face face you draw on top of your face. What this filter does it 99% just what you can do with make-up.
We have lip-fillers, we have breast implants, we have fake teeth and eyebrows.
And we embrace this, we consider it essential, expected. We've given up on thinking, and given in to feeling, enjoying. Hedonism doesn't require substance, just surface.
Social media has been a blessing for me to be honest, I'm going to hell for saying this, because I'm going against the grain, maybe you meet people in real life that are amazing, but I don't. I see a lot of skilled people, funny and cool people on social media, I get things from social media, that I can't get in real life.
Same goes for the website called news.ycombinator, it's very difficult to find these kind of people in real life. If I didn't know this website, things would have gone differently.
I wish that was true. I wish that were true. In practice, as virtual experiences become better and more realistic, I would expect people to spend more time in virtual environments, not less
Or it’s time to sign up (or get back) to these networks because someone will make better content based not on looks and personalities but on an art of impression and interesting plots instead. Personalities are dull and template, especially looks-based ones.
If that’s not true anymore, and everything is fiction, it’s probably time to get back to IRL experiences.
We just got more fiction. What you thought is true is likely not anyway, so relax. Like/dislike crowd will take care of truth as usual.
Wow, I am so glad I'm not the parent of a teenage girl right now.
At the same time, I wonder if perfect filters like this might actually result in people rejecting beauty standards like this. I mean, if everyone can easily look this good online, if people start to think that it's impossible to determine the veracity of anything that wasn't done face-to-face, maybe people will just start rejecting it. Kind of like how I never answer my phone anymore from numbers I don't know because there is a 95%+ chance it's spam/phishing/etc.
I wonder if perfect filters like this might actually result in people rejecting beauty standards like this.
Maybe it's because I was used to an earlier era, in which photos actually had to be developed and were taken with something called film, but I suspect I'm not the only one who finds this sort of "beauty" very unnatural and even somewhat repulsive, almost uncanny-valley style. It's like they don't look like actual humans anymore, but more like androids pretending to be humans.
In other words, this filter doesn't look "realistic" to me at all.
I didn't know there was no manipulation done to photos taken on film. It's not like dodge and burn tools in Photoshop are named after real life process.
This one time, a colleague of mine was working from home and we had a meeting and when I joined the video call I thought that we had someone new joining the meeting... except when my other colleague said "Hi [HER_NAME]" and I realized who it was. I was shocked that it was the same person.
What beauty filters do can be done using make up... except make up is more deceiving because since we see it in front of our eyes, we are more likely to believe it.
Make up did not change beauty standards and this won't either.
I am looking forward to the time when everyone will look amazing and everyone can live in it their whole lives, never having to see anyone ugly... when all of us transition to living our whole lives in the metaverse.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the basis GP was using for making that claim, but based on the experiences of women I've talked to about this, it's almost universally understood that interactions in almost any social context will be affected if a woman chooses not to wear makeup. I'd highly suggest to any man who doesn't believe this to ask women in their life who would be open to this sort of discussion to honestly ask about this; I think you'll be surprised how much the choice of whether to wear makeup affects even professional life for women. A coworker at a camp I worked at after my freshman year of college who did freelance work during the year said clients would agree to higher rates when she interviewed wearing makeup compared to without makeup. This isn't an isolated thing; a quick google found a reddit[1] threat discussing this topic where server discuss making larger tips based on not just the presence of makeup but also based on specific types of looks (e.g. the shade of lipstick). One commenter even mentioned that they're _required_ to wear makeup to work.
Makeup quite literally added an extra artificial step that society decided was required for women to be taken seriously in professional contexts. You might be able to make the argument that professional standards are as high for men appearance-wise (although I'd personally be skeptical of such a claim), but if you think that makeup didn't cause the standards to change for women, you're deluding yourself.
What men hate is excessive, badly done makeup. Most men would prefer the 'natural looking', which is actually makeup, but well done. People wouldn't notice a good makeup, but a bad one they will remember. Most men wouldn't love no makeup.
Teenage girls are crowding the make-up sections in my local drug stores and most 15 year olds I encounter are wearing some kind of makeup nowadays. Even boys have started using make-up, although more subtle to conceal pimples and such.
After playing with AI generated human photos for a while, now I've come to appreciate (little edited) real photos and people in real life much more than before. I love the flaws, the imperfections, the characteristics, the deviations that make each one of us unique. The AI is so good at creating the 'perfect average' that makes it so boring, monotonous, and tedious. People call it 'soulless'. But when it comes to variation, it starts generating the uncanny valley. It fails hard.
They look stylistically realistic, but are indeed unnatural and easy to spot as fake. It's probably just that picking up on the clues depends on how attentive you are to what details in face.
But "nearly impossible to see" is going to last all of a week, until the people who are currently blind to them start picking up on the tells.
It's a good discussion though, because they're just going to keep improving.
> but are indeed unnatural and easy to spot as fake
I think you're underestimating the difficulty of the latter. Without direct comparisons, how do you know the filter is there as opposed to heavy makeup, plastic surgery, or it's just their face?
> “Realistic” in the sense that it’s nearly impossible to see that a filter is being applied.
After looking at several of the videos, you start to notice some similarities, at which point it becomes a lot more obvious.
The vast majority of normal people just don't look like that, certainly not most of the time. So if you see someone with a perfect-looking face like in these videos, either they're a professional model or they've used a filter. Not hard to figure out which one of those possibilities is overwhelmingly more likely..
Still, even if you know all that it probably won't be enough to stop this stuff from messing with your brain if you look at it often enough.
I remember watching this Jetsons sketch [1] as a youngster and never thought I'd see the day when it would become reality. What's even more amazing is its a filter rather than something physical like in the sketch.
I love it, because it’ll very quickly teach people that these images aren’t real.
Photoshoots of celebrities have been heavily edited since forever, but I think people don’t really realise that on a fundamental level because they see relatively few. One year of this and no teenager is going to believe any photo they see of a celeb or influencer is real, and will stop chasing it.
Maybe.
Anyway, I think my point is that we’re rapidly transitioning to a world where realistic photos and videos are no longer proof of anything, and the transition between before and after will be awkward, so the more it can be accelerated the better
The truly creepy thing is that the app is watching you as you observe your filtered self. I wouldn't be surprised if they tweaked the filters, or created new ones, based on A/B testing and watching the users' reactions.
But that's the issue, it looks like a kilogram of botox and makeup, not like a digital filter. Whatever you would date, a filter can do it in real-time without artifacts.
Seems like it is just works for some people. These dramatic videos get clicks. It made some odd and inhuman looking adjustments to my gf. Made her cheek bones look weird and mouth to wide. Not as good as I seen her with pro make up. Interestingly it didn't change anything about me, a male. Maybe I'm already beautiful?
The teen one didn't look good for us either. Face was too smooth, didn't handle stubble on my face. Looked nothing like how I actually looked at 18.
> The teen one didn't look good for us either. Face was too smooth, didn't handle stubble on my face. Looked nothing like how I actually looked at 18.
I tried the teen one, and had a similar result. I don't think it plays nicely with a full beard, but I definitely didn't see a younger version of myself on the screen.
I have a largish beard and my kids are always amused by how badly the filters work with the beard. It's like the edge detection for faces gets completely thrown off by it, so the filter just half removes it, leaving an aurora of beard outside my fake filtered face.
You need a smartphone to take part in modern social life. (Yes, adults can choose life without a smartphone or any social media, in reality teenagers can't without being ostracised).
On the other hand using smartphones and social media can also result in stress and comparing your ordinary life to other people's highlights.
What about a smartphone that is locked down? Apps are curated by parents and certain websites blocked.
Also, there are tons of things that have ostracized teenagers in the last. Why do smartphones have such a stranglehold? It seems we are becoming more and more afraid of being different.
It's not "being different" not having a smartphone to keep in contact with your peers is akin to being homeschooled /w no hobbies. You basically have no social circle to speak of.
Without a smartphone and access to the chat app of choice, you'll be left out of a good part of out-of-school socialisation. For example nobody gives out invites to birthdays on cards at class anymore, they do it via WhatsApp and you reply the same way.
Yea, but access to chatting apps isn't necessarily the same as access to social media apps, except maybe Facebook's messaging. Having WhatsApp, text messaging, iMessage, Line, WeChat, etc. doesn't mean you need to install TikTok or Instagram.
I got ridiculed for wearing glasses, having to wear a mouth guard in sports because of braces, having long legs, crossing my legs, being "clean", the wheels on my truck, for the music I liked. Who cares?
I'm not sure training to minimize ridicule or being different is all that effective in the long run. Will someone in their 20s, 30s, and 40s remark that they really wish they could have been on TikTok more when they were younger?
As far as the usages of "dropped" in music industry terminology goes, I think it's pretty clear which meaning is intended. But outside of that, when the direct object is not a person, it's often ambiguous enough that it would be better to either use a different word or at least change the phrasing to add additional clues to the meaning.
Next logical step is filter customization that you carry around and gets applied seamlessly to all videos you post on the platform. Next to that becomes filters that get applied based on consumer preferences: if you have indicated a certain preference for big brown eyes, TikTok might enlarge and darken them for all videos you watch. Argh.
I wish she would’ve gone into more detail on why it’s bad, why it’s so frightening. I know the answer; but many don’t, and no one of the videos posted, gave any good insight on why this is scary. Call out the problem!
Seems like most of the videos posted in that thread are just adding noise to the existing noise. (For clicks of course)
My 1.99 penny doom prediction: this is actually good, and will help destroy beauty standards in general. Beauty will not matter when it is easily achievable/buyable. People will look at any sort of body modding technics with disgust. Similar to how Instagram effects (like color overlay, bloom, burn-in) were first seen as nice but quickly everything had it, it took 2 taps, and looking back now it's incredibly tacky.
Given that we have a psychological vulnerability to supernormalization, I fear that it will cause even the most naturally beautiful people in our society to feel ugly and unlovable for even their smallest imperfections and alter our beauty standards to the point where supermodels in real life are considered merely the "girl next door".
Of course, we could have a global awakening and see through the lies the industry is pushing on us and reject this trend entirely, but I fear the former is more likely than the latter.
Imagine the time when you get an app like that does this effect, and then tells you: it will cost you $2500 to have the required procedures to permanently look like this in real life. Referring you to your closest plastic surgeon.
There was a post a few days ago about a GPT that was trained on HN. It would be interesting if it could be tweaked so that highly-upvoted posts had more weight. That would allow you to create output that sounds like a smart HNer.
I wonder what attributes such comments have in common?
Not sure I understand the commotion. The same thing can be done in the real world with enough time and money. But somehow doing it digitally for free is a problem?
If teenage girls don't know how to handle this then maybe we should teach them?
Impressing tec! But i never liked make-up or understood why people pay plastic surgeons to ruin their perfectly nice and authentic faces. It kind of makes people artificial and way less interesting. So this is lost on me.
That's available now, for about $10-20 you can buy a set of 'beer goggles' and everyone around you becomes 5x better looking. Bonus, you become a fantastically interesting conversationalist whose plans always work out perfectly.
I wonder when this technology will be good/flexible enough to use in filmmaking, where it seems like it could replace a chunk of work currently done by makeup/VFX, and give real-time results.
There’s an old Asimov short story, Gold, which describes a future of filmmaking that seems more similar to this than the way movies are currently made: everything is animated/CGI, but in real-time—the animators are performers as well who deliver their performance while the director offers feedback.
How is this evil & bad? why was face makeup allowed in the first place? why is this suddenly evil huh? cause it's free? you can't sell oily makeup products anymore? or is OP behind this Ai trick and he just wants to promote his thesis by getting people angry? everyone is playing chess every single seconds these days I can't trust nothing.
I haven't tried this filter, but some of the older filters would alter the structure of the face. Makes the jaw a bit more defined, higher cheekbones, makes nose smaller, changes eyes, and the list goes on.
And once people start using these beauty filters, it's hard to go back if you're somewhat insecure to start with. Unfortunately, many of these things can be done permanently via surgery. Do we want a whole generation of teenagers that dream of getting their face "fixed" ?
The examples below her tweet just show it to be basically animation. No real semblance to the real faces. Reminds me of a lot of the fantasyland Snap has been propagating for a while now. More Roger Rabbit than filter.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine an airbrush stamping on a human face— forever.”
I didn't download the videos to test, but I had the impression it was changing the voice slightly as well, making it a little deeper and cleaning up a little of the ambient sound.
>It's doing plastic surgery too, on cheek bones, jawline, nose. Also changes shape of eyes, eyebrows, lips, teeth. It even seems to be doing different things to different people. (You may not be able to see all this on this small selection, but Ive been through hundreds of videos)
I think it's fine. Filters aren't a new thing. It's a problem for kids, but children should be banned from social media for an enormous number of reasons.
The problem with TikTok isn't the filters. It's the password/clipboard scraping, the enormous level of data collection on its users, combined with the fact that TikTok is ultimately a wing of the Chinese Communist Party.
The whole point though is that undetectable filters are a new thing. Like the first video said, you used to be able to know when someone was using a filter or not, and that's not really true anymore.
Plus, as some of the other videos in that tweet thread say, it's not like these filters haven't fucked with people's heads already, e.g. the photographer who takes actual photos of people and then people look behind the camera and are shocked at how "ugly" they are because the filtered view is their baseline.
I do not buy into the moral panic angle. At least for women, the result is basically like putting on professional make up. It is not obvious that it is a filter, but it is obviously make up. It is quite possible for them to look like that in real life, if they put in the effort.
Eh. Instagram had filters years and years ago, so much that people developed #nofilter. Video is different but I don't think that it so fundamentally changes the situation.
I'm feeling very raw about all this. I feel I need to call all that comes this app what it is: an attack on our country via its young people.
An attempt to turn the West's teenagers, especially women, into unserious and manipulable adults. In America, a non-immigrant teenager has little chance to graduate high school knowing the laws of electromagnetism, or other valuable scientific and engineering knowledge necessary for society to face its challenges. Instead, they have every chance to learn all sorts of modern inventions: genders, ever more contrived notions or identity, social justice shibboleths, etc..
The result is an American public that is profoundly unserious in its approach to the world. Factually, they rely of foreign migration to sustain their core functions: healthcare, etc... They don't solve their problems at home.
When I see TikTok I see an act of hybrid warfare. I see foreign aggression against America, no different than if that power introduced a powerful synthetic opioid into the country. Flat-out aggression isn't acceptable, so they strike at us indirectly while maintaining plausible deniability. The advertising on TikTok is valuable, so many influential individuals in business will look the other way.
Only a week ago the media were up in arms about the "revelation" that 30% of teenage girls now state they consider suicide, and a 36% increase in reported feelings of hopelessness since 2011. If politicians do not speak the truth in plain terms, truly I can only consider them traitors, and jointly responsible for the additional deaths that result.
Interestingly, it'd be the humanities that were most equipped to study this sort of topic. The "tech is apolitical" stembros who never took a history course in their education don't have any experience using the tools to analyze this kind of situation. Maybe... support the humanities that you so deeply oppose in your post?
Ah, come on. Stop with the 'everyone is our enemy' America-centered xenophobic mindset. The issues with Tiktok are of the same family with issues of other social media, or internet phenomena. Other countries, other communities are facing those same problems. It's not like situation in China is different and better. I bet some folks in China certainly blame the west for their newly rising problems, too.
Social justice fads are primarily distributed via social media. In particular, TikTok is notorious for promulgating it to K-12 age students. It displaces more meaningful media, educational and otherwise.
To reiterate: the prosperity of the country depends on young people being educated in stem fields, whereas because of TikTok they are being socialized in a different way entirely.
This is a very important point. We're already seeing the effects of an uncontrolled internet in the West. What greater way to erode a power than to erode the effectiveness of its future leaders and workers?
However, China does have the same app, under a different name. I wonder if these emotionally manipulative fads are allowed there. My understanding is that they are. Plastic surgery is extremely popular in southeast Asian countries, and I see a lot of vapid YouTube Shorts and Instagram Stories from both Asia and the West.
TikTok is extremely accurate in its emotional manipulation. I get targeted ads for it, and despite not using the app, the ads draw very heavily on specific emotions and interests. It's a bit scary, to say the least. It shows the strength of the pull and inability to escape once you're in.
What? American companies started this trend, remember Snapshat?
And if you just realized the danger of foreign tech companies that control social discourse, don't act surprised when other countries do the same to US apps like the EU or China.
This has nothing to do with nations or "The West". The same things are happening in countries outside the West -- look at the health impacts of soda in South America or the culture of plastic surgery in South Korea.
It's just companies optimizing singularly for profit. Your tobacco companies, opioid companies, fast food companies, legacy social networks, gambling companies, alcohol companies and oil and gas companies have been doing damage to regular people for longer than Tik Tok has, and for the exact same reasons.
It's funny seeing American blame other unfriendly countries for their new problems, especially when it's ubiquitous on mainstream media. Odd that no one has blamed China, or Russia, or any aggressive foreign state for their overweight, obesity epidemic.
Do you really think our problem is lack of STEM education tho? are you sure increasing our production rate would benefit our world? last time I checked that line of thought called Modernism and overproduction led humanity to WW1 & 2. Our grandparents tried to warn us their every waking moments but we forgot about it almost up to people in their 70 years old. It's only in books now... and it's very scary seeing people unironically saying this
I regret emphasizing stem in my comment. I meant to offer it as an example of the kind of education that may be valuable. I don't see increasing production rate as the end goal, nor any other kind of "line goes up" political objective. I recognize human flourishing happens at the confluence of factors.
Nevertheless, I see the connection as follows: we are forced to play nice with enemy nations because of our economic independence on them: we turn a blind eye to what fentanyl did to the middle/lower classes largely because nationally we have our own addiction to Chinese products. We could significantly reduce our dependency by producing homespun expertise, despite it being less efficient. I value independence first of all.
Re: modernism, I'm not qualified to comment, but I expect that's just one perspective on the causes of those wars.
If there was an American app that all Chinese teens were hopelessly addicted to it wouldn't take long for the CIA to get access and run influence campaigns. That is incredibly obvious. This is really our own fault that we just don't think China is that capable for some reason.
Makeup, plastic surgery, hair implants, Bentleys, this filter, lying on your resume, etc. What’s the difference? People who are into it will be into it, and others will not care and just avoid. Isn’t this what the people want though, so why not give it to them in our capitalist society? I mean, you can’t even find one negative comment in YouTube anymore. So like, why look at people who don’t fit what we as a majority find statistically attractive? They do it with people in movies and TVs. Only basic and naive people care about this stuff…a filter is not going to do more damage to how they already think. Raise a kid to value knowledge, relationships and morals and they couldn’t care less about this. Let them swim freely in our garbage society of deception and greed and this is what you get. Meh
An EPIC scene from "The Congress" (2014): A short but entirely mesmerizing drug come-down, reality dissolving scene from the film "The Congress" (2014) based on the 1971 novel "The Futurological Congress" by Stanisław Lem. All rights to the makers.
DonHopkins on Sept 14, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Future According to Stanisław Lem
I just watched The Congress -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) -- and WOW, it was excellent. Quite different from the book The Futurological Conference that it's based on: for example, it had cockroaches playing poker instead of sewer rats playing bridge. ;) But well worth watching for its unique take on the entertainment dictatorship. If you liked Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Looker, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you won't be disappointed! Something weird happens in the middle of the film, that's all I'll say...
>According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.
It took longer than its length of two hours to watch, because I had to stop and rewind to replay and and freeze frames frequently. (Check out what's going on in the fish tank while she's saying "I wish you could see me animated, it's pretty sick. It's like a genius designer on a bad acid trip. Oh my god, I don't know, I look like a combination between Cinderella on heroin and an Egyptian queen on a bad hair day".)
I'm going to have to watch it many more times, because there were a lot of details to absorb -- time will tell if it's up there with Blade Runner as one of my favorite movies very loosely based on a great book.
DonHopkins on Sept 5, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
I really loved the movie The Congress, directed by Ari Folman, an adaptation of The Futurological Congress. Like Blade Runner's relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was a lot different than the book, but shares some deep ideas, and stands on its own as a great movie.
The scene in the USC ICT's motion capture studio was riveting, with Robin Wright playing a partly fictionalized version of herself, and Harvey Keitel playing her agent, baring their souls to the giant emotion capturing machine.
DonHopkins 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Paul Debevec created the Light Stage to capture high dynamic range reflectance fields (including clean high resolution normal/bump/gloss/texture maps) of human faces. It uses hundreds polarized LED lights and cameras, plus lots of image processing, to separate the lighting effects of specular reflectance (glossy shine) from subsurface scattering (glowing skin), so you can reconstruct the 3D image and relight it under different conditions, environments, and viewing angles.
A Light Stage was featured in the 2013 film "The Congress", which is a 2013 film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's book, "The Futurological Congress", directed by Ari Folman:
I really love that movie and the book it was based on, which both raised some interesting issues: Like Blade Runner's relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was a lot different than the book, but shares some deep ideas, and stands on its own as a great movie.
The Congress Official Trailer (2014) Robin Wright, Jon Hamm HD:
The scan scene in the Light Stage at USC ICT's motion capture studio was emotionally riveting and technically realistic, with Robin Wright playing a partially fictionalized version of herself, with Harvey Keitel playing her agent, baring her face and soul to the sparkling panoptic all encompassing emotion capturing machine.
Why are all the videos saying this is awful? I feel like I’m missing something… is the idea that people will learn that they’re not 10/10 attractive when they use this filter?
I’m pretty sure most people are aware of this, and if they’re, it’s on them to reconsider their values things if that kind of thing has a big impact on their ego…
the women gender identity has a lot people that are susceptible to body dysphoria, we don't actually know why or the nature of this mental state or how much of it is cultural conditioning or a side effect of pure selection or anything else, we just try to accommodate
the rest of us will never understand why countries felt the need to regulate post-processing in fashion magazines, or why filters have any affect at all
but if its a social problem for a large population, which it is, then we have to react to that or at least acknowledge that it is.
I didn’t know about the regulation of image processing, thanks.
I agree with your main point, that we should address body dysphoria… I just think that this ubiquitous meme that “beauty filters make people more insecure overall” is wrong.
The beautification achieved by these filters has been around for over 20 years. The difference is that today, that technology is accessible to everyone— any little girl can go to Snapchat and look like Kim Kardashian, and say “oh, this isn’t real.”
Whereas 20 years ago celebrities would spend hours upon hours with cosmeticians, surgeons, make up artists, and digital FX artists sculpting their image, all to appear on the cover of a magazine saying “my new diet has worked wonders for my skin!”
The playing field is more level than ever. And also, the technology isn’t going anywhere. So I think the best next move is to have conversations (especially with daughters) about taking pride in the parts of you that won’t be washed away by an AR filter.
You chat with people online because you think, you know, that people exist on the other side.
You spend time on instagram, tiktok, and so, to get a glimpse of real people (as opposed to TV where a lot is fiction/sfx).
You trust photos because, barring dedicated, time-consuming and skill-intensive editing, they should represent reality.
If that’s not true anymore, and everything is fiction, it’s probably time to get back to IRL experiences.