Artificial Intelligence and illogical fear

Browse any social media platform and the number of scantily clad and very photogenic women with a blurred background will be impossible to overlook. While some of these images are indeed real women who have been photographed with a lens that utilises proximity focusing, many are blatantly false. They have been generated using one or more 'seed' images which then create an original composite according to their various algorithms. 

Fake imagery of good looking chicks is nothing new. Since well before digital methods, men have been superimposing the high profile faces of well known actresses onto ludicrously pornographic body shot images. In fact it has become somewhat of an industry standard complete with awards for the best skin tone blending and so forth. It's actually quite difficult to make a composite image look real. With the passage of time it becomes harder to fool anyone at all. Believing that these celebrity hotties have decided to throw their careers down the toilet and allow highly revealing imagery of themselves to be disseminated into the public domain, is not rational. Increasingly the audience simply don't care. They've seen legitimate leaks courtesy of phenomenon such as 'the Fappening' and with over saturation, they really don't care if the images are real or not. This has provided a viable platform for the rise of the type of AI generated imagery as seen here.

The entirely compelling image above makes for a perfect subject for analysis. Look closely at the hands, the gap between the thighs and the way they taper. These are not natural representations of the female form. The author has actually  studied these attributes in real world cases at length and is highly qualified in this regard. Conversely it appears that the individuals fabricating these images have not and are not. They probably fit a stereotype of vapid, queer incels who expend a lot of time thinking about ways to fool people.

Nonetheless any artist of this calibre should be rightfully commended for their work. It is literally a far better thing that they do than has ever been done before. Digital titillation in decades past was about as engaging as a 1940's Land Army poster. Even in the era of sixteen bit computing, the most hard core content available would be something along the lines of Leisure Suit Larry or Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Both compelling revamps of 8-bit classics and entertaining in their time, but hardly much competition for VHS Swedish Erotica imported illegally on North Sea trawlers. 

Many will remember the highly intuitive algorithms that accompanied these games. By the time the Playstation was rolled out to Western markets, certain games development houses were using psychometric profiling to enhance gaming experience. In less floral terms - as you learn how to play the game, the game learns how to play you. This has become common practice in video gaming which has beaten music and films to be the largest media market in the world for the past decade and a half. So much so that many console now games require an internet connection and potentially two factor authentication via mobile phone. The internet connection invariably facilitates some form of DC (Downloadable Content). This shift toward an equivalent of an SaaS delivery model is obviously not without it's production of ancillary data. To the point where licensing models exist based on how many heartbeats the kinetic sensor detects within a three metre radius. 

Considering the consumer level access to deep fake technology and the realism depicted in the AI generated imagery above, it seems that we're not far away from interactive rendering on the level of a Peter Jackson epic. The distinction between FMV's and actual gameplay has been narrowing for years. TEFLONRABBIT expects there to be fully immersive vector based gameplay rendered with as much clarity as is seen in the AI models above. 

While this all bodes well for sales of video games (especially adult themed gaming), it doesn't equate to confidence in the media at large. There has been speculation that Donald Trump was portrayed using deep fake technology in 2019 without informing the viewers. This would represent a great victory for Team Trump in the weaving of other people's realities. As would another president's portrayal of a White House resident as something other than what they are. Social media is regularly graced with wonderful soliloquies from Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. She delves into highly credible subjects such as going to the Sun at night, because it's cooler at night and would provide valuable research into global warming. To be fair listening to these satirical monologues is often less cringeworthy than enduring any of her political views. The point being that while most informatico digitales or 'geeks' accept these deep fake satires with the good humour they are intended, the established political system absolutely hates them. Satirical deep fakes have faced even more negative feedback than GTA San Andreas with the Hot Coffee Mod. 

Regardless of asinine BS like the Campaign against Carl Johnson, the ongoing attempts to curtail the suspension of disbelief through digital methods prevails. They just won't shut up and keep trying to pass legislation designed to intimidate purveyors and the audience of such high calibre hilarity. The logical extrapolation of this is that eventually nobody will give a shit whether it's real or not. The ongoing need to content to be veracious will simply cease to exist. Most likely there will be attempts to stem the inexorable transition. It would be reasonable to envisage an extension of the verification trend in social media. This will potentially become a platform specific agenda. If the board of Social Media giant 'String Cans' wish to make their platform appear to have greater integrity that their largest competitor, then they will seek to discredit their competitor. Most likely this will involve flooding their competitor(s) with disposable accounts with deliberately spurious content.  There is an argument to say that this is already happening, however it's almost impossible to prove. 

The future promises great things in terms of the suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately there are those who would harness this to bolster their perception management portfolio. Consequently a discerning eye for detail will become more critically important as the ability to tell shit from Shynola becomes the deciding factor between the audience acting independently and acting like a zombie bot in downtown Vice City.