[HN Gopher] Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using...
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Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp
Author : amrrs
Score : 628 points
Date : 2021-03-19 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mothership.sg)
(TXT) w3m dump (mothership.sg)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Makes sense. It's a performance. I don't get upset that Sir
| Patrick Stewart can't actually telepathically communicate with
| all of Earth.
| [deleted]
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Isn't there already controversy if this is being currently used
| in the Biden administration. The guy hasn't been seen with
| reporters. The last time he answered questions the microphone
| seemingly passed through his hand. And there's also a video of
| his election victory in front of a parking lot of staged cars.
| With a screen playing his address, while the podium is empty.
| He's getting the nickname C.G.I Joe.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| :shrug:...would still hit
| njharman wrote:
| Almost to the point were this is not newsworthy. As in its so
| common, expected, and not novel. Like it's not a major story when
| someone is found driving without insurance.
| Sunspark wrote:
| The real singularity will be when one can have realtime deepfake
| video of themselves making trap porn.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| FYI, you've used a slur -- Tr*p is a slur for transgender folks
| often used in association with porn. You may want to either
| clarify your meaning (in case you are using the word in a
| different meaning) or choose a different word.
| Sunspark wrote:
| I am specifically referencing it in the porn fetish context
| which is accurate, especially when identifying the logical
| evolution of faceapp.
|
| I would not use this word in any other context, and in fact,
| cannot use another word in the porn fetish context because
| there are no non-offensive words to describe the fetish which
| I am aware of at the current time. Apologies to anyone who
| may have felt offended, this was not my wish and there is a
| very clear difference between a person and a fetish.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| My wife owns a wedding dress shop. She uses up to 25% of her time
| to produce content for social media.
|
| One day she decided to mix/merge her face with Jennifer Aniston's
| and that was a game changer for the business in terms of audience
| engagement.
| JacobSuperslav wrote:
| what app did you use to change it?
| colordrops wrote:
| Have you all been following the green screened Biden interview?
| Watch the light grey mic - Biden's hand can't decide if it wants
| to be in front or behind the mic. Something weird is going on:
|
| https://twitter.com/i/events/1372500525346820099
|
| An army of "fact checkers" has been dispatched for damage
| control.
| henearkr wrote:
| Did he want to make the promotion of bikes and biking at any
| cost?
|
| I have to testify that in Japan there is a wave of fashion and TV
| celebrities affecting a public discourse of "oh no the Japanese
| industry will be soon dying because of the push for
| electrification of all vehicles!".
|
| Also, most of the loud (and very suffocating, when they zoom past
| you) bikers near my home are either old men (like this man) or in
| some cases their children.
|
| Was this Youtuber trying to do his best to save the youth's
| interest in motorbikes?
|
| I would really like to see these kind of bikes fade into
| oblivion, instead of being promoted to youngsters through "deep
| fake young idols" Youtube channels.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Well there goes celebrity news sites like TMZ.
|
| Maybe it is good thing , remember that song from a few years bacl
| "it wasn't me" is now a rather a plausible excuse.
| swayvil wrote:
| This guy is a Prometheus. He deserves to star in many future
| cartoons and memes.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| Counting 215 comments and nobody quoted Neil Stephenson yet. The
| books are worth reading, dear young ones.
|
| "The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the
| audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other
| in the Metaverse. ...
|
| Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the
| limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your
| avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar
| can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied
| makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant
| talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down
| the Street and you will see all of these."
| augustocallejas wrote:
| With this clear example of separation between individual and
| identity, it calls into question the need for real celebrities.
| What difference does it make if you're watching/following someone
| real/digital?
|
| https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/lil-miquela-digital-avatar-in...
| mhh__ wrote:
| There is a streamer who has a very expensive live tracking
| setup who actually streams entirely from inside (what is
| basically) a game emulating a stream room. The content itself
| isn't really my cup of tea, but the visuals are already beyond
| the uncanny valley.
|
| https://www.ginx.tv/en/twitch/who-is-code-miko-the-virtual-s...
| dharmab wrote:
| "Hololive" is another example. They're all real people, but
| using digital appearances and personas.
| scollet wrote:
| Iirc Gorillaz and Vocaloids were massively successful
| experiments in this domain.
|
| I think some of the critique in the former was lost (i.e.
| Weezer), but it definitely opened the gates for popular digital
| avatars.
| megous wrote:
| Any guesses if FitGirl is also a 50-year old guy (or two) that's
| just very much into compression/repacking? :)
| cjohansson wrote:
| Interesting phenomena. I don't see any issues with it really.
| Many influencers do plastic surgery and other modifications to
| themselves to be more popular, this is a healthier alternative
| the-dude wrote:
| _On the internet, nobody knows you 're a dog_ [ 1993 ]
|
| [ 1993 ]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
| balozi wrote:
| [2021] On the internet, it doesn't matter that you are a dog
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Thanks goodness. I was getting nervous. Have a good Friday
| everyone, I'm feeling a little shaggy, so I'm off to the
| groomer, er, barber.
| johncessna wrote:
| > [2021] On the internet, it doesn't matter that you are a
| dog
|
| Wishful thinking. A cursory glance at twitter or facebook
| will show you that it very much matters what tribe you're
| from.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Reminds me of a mousepad my dad received as am early customer
| of Amazon.
|
| "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a
| dog, it's too dark to read."
| jodrellblank wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-no-girls-on-the-int... -
| "there are no girls on the internet" meme/trope dates back to
| Usenet 1992
|
| [then again, why believe that 50 year old man photo is the
| person's real face or hair? Surely media photos have been
| Photoshopped since long before face-swapping apps?]
| dr-smooth wrote:
| it is damn nice hair for a 50 year old...
| kuu wrote:
| Likes are more important than the fact of sharing your
| experience, therefore tricks are used
| yCombLinks wrote:
| You're not sharing your experience if there's no-one to share
| it with.
| cm2187 wrote:
| You will soon need a computer science degree with a major in deep
| fake detection to use online dating safely
| mrweasel wrote:
| Perhaps the main issue is that the guy has a point, nobody want's
| to see an uncle.
|
| The majority of "influencers" are young women, and only a
| minority would want to follow a 50 year old uncle. I don't think
| there's much we can do about it, it's human nature. It does
| however limit the diversity and world views people are exposed to
| and sometimes it's nice to see the world through the eyes of a 50
| year Japanese biker.
| _jal wrote:
| It is such a bizarre market. I sometimes browse it for
| sociological amusement, but it creeps me out quickly.
|
| For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like
| subscribe share" I just turn it off. I have no idea why people
| like watching other people begging impersonally for attention.
| justapassenger wrote:
| It's just how economic of YouTube works. If you don't have
| likes, subscribes and views, you don't make money. And if you
| want high quality content, it costs money.
|
| Lots of educational channels I watch do it, and I fully
| understand why they do it.
| creamynebula wrote:
| Marketing teaches us that this works, they call it a CTA -
| Call To Action, asking people to do what you want them to
| works...
| wruza wrote:
| Youtube could simply inverse that and make their "don't
| recommend channel" actually fucking work. Then people would
| just unsubscribe from what is not needed periodically and
| watch a feed full of what they actually like automagically.
| But of course it is much easier to leave creators on their
| own and profit from those who survive, while doing your job
| with a left heel. Youtube doesn't deserve a penny from
| these hardworking guys.
| watwut wrote:
| > I have no idea why people like watching other people
| begging impersonally for attention.
|
| I am aware two things:
|
| 1.) If they earn money from youtube, they need likes and
| subscriptions so that youtube algoritm shows them to more
| people.
|
| 2.) I as a programmer earn more money with less effort then
| them. I also very likely have to deal with less bs (like
| harassments and jerks trying to insult you or take you down
| for lolz).
|
| A combination makes me accept that these people are doing
| entertainment as work, I consume that entertainment for free
| and thus am absolutely fine with them trying to succeed.
|
| There is also absolutely nothing wrong with entertainers
| wanting attention. That is what pays their bills, without
| attention they cant be successful. Attention is not dirty
| word to me.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| I don't understand it either. If there are 2 channels with
| otherwise comparable quality and 1 begs me for likes/subs,
| I'll watch the other one
| porcc wrote:
| Let me recommend a solution: https://sponsor.ajay.app/
| the_arun wrote:
| Well, The UI, Logo etc., feels like my browser blocked me
| from going to sponsor.ajay.app url - insecure, evil site. I
| closed the browser window. But went there again to see what
| it says.
| irrational wrote:
| Wow! This is terrific!
| citruscomputing wrote:
| Been using this for a month or so - game changer. Can skip
| in-video advertisements, interaction reminders,
| introductions, (configurably) via a user-submitted and
| curated database.
| thraway123412 wrote:
| > For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like
| subscribe share" I just turn it off.
|
| I do too, but not without first hitting the dislike button. I
| only wish others would do the same.
| wruza wrote:
| Btw, it is not clear whether a dislike drowns the content -
| people believe it's inverse, and you're helping. Best you
| can do to counteract is closing a tab.
| throwaway53453 wrote:
| Wow, so you're fine with hurting creators who just happen
| to be drowning in a competitive marketplace?
|
| People who don't say those words exist, but you won't find
| them very easily. There's a reason for that.
| thraway123412 wrote:
| What do I owe them?
|
| Nagging and soliciting subs and likes is fucking
| annoying. If you want me to like a video, make a good
| video and stop nagging.
|
| If I dislike those naggers enough, maybe Google's stupid
| artificial non-intelligence will eventually learn to
| recommend only videos from non-naggers. I try, even
| though I don't have much faith in Google's algorithms.
| capableweb wrote:
| > For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like
| subscribe share" I just turn it off. I have no idea why
| people like watching other people begging impersonally for
| attention.
|
| Same here. There are some YouTube channels I really want to
| watch and follow as I can learn new skills from them, but the
| constant begging and over-dramatization is a real turnoff so
| I cannot watch it without feeling bad about it.
|
| I have a similar feeling about people who takes photos of
| themselves all the time and their social feed is filled with
| the photos they take of themselves. I can't take a photo of
| myself without feeling vain, and I'm getting passive-vain
| feelings when I see friends of mine posting selfie after
| selfie of themselves...
| [deleted]
| wnevets wrote:
| >For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like
| subscribe share" I just turn it off.
|
| I used to as well but realized platforms like YouTube
| effectively force the creators to do it.
| Others wrote:
| The issue here is that YouTube (and other platforms)
| encourage this. It works, in that if you ask people to like
| comment and subscribe, they like comment and subscribe more.
| (And that boosts your standing within the system getting you
| more impressions.)
|
| Plenty of good creators do this (as it works), just to keep
| up with their peers. It really has nothing to do with the
| quality of the rest of their content. Don't blame the player,
| blame the game IMO
| CM30 wrote:
| This. I run a... moderately popular by niche standards
| channel myself, and asking for likes, subscribes, comments
| etc gave me way more of them than I was getting before. I'm
| not particularly interested in the monetary side of things,
| but for getting a bit more popular on the platform... it's
| worked well.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There are also plenty of content creators that don't beg
| for likes or subscriptions if that kind of thing bothers
| you.
| imglorp wrote:
| Okay, I'll hate the game. The game has existed since the
| first radio ad spot in 1922, the first TV ad spot in 1941,
| and the first banner ad in 1994.
|
| I would far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view
| or a video roll than be subjected to in-content advertising
| and begging from the creators. Certainly, creators would
| prefer to do their thing instead of beg and scrape.
|
| What can we do to accelerate micropayment tech and
| patronage communities for creators?
| Aerroon wrote:
| YouTube quite literally has a subscription service. With
| the service you don't see ads on videos and creators get
| a cut based on how much you watch different content. It's
| been around for years, but has remained rather unpopular.
|
| You're not wrong though. Most creators probably hate
| asking for stuff.
| wisty wrote:
| There's a few creators who often have a block at the end
| who tell you that they won't ask you to like or subscribe
| because even though it's good for the channel they hate
| doing it and refuse to do it.
| snypher wrote:
| This seems like an anti-pattern and if they were sincere,
| wouldn't mention it at all.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > What can we do to accelerate micropayment tech and
| patronage communities for creators?
|
| Make them nonprofit foundations democratically run rather
| than middlemen biding their time until they can increase
| their margins or sell to a megacorp.
| datavirtue wrote:
| What can we do? Deregulate the payments industry. Ain't
| gonna happen though. The regulators and the regulated
| like things just the way they are.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Surprisingly, tiktok is better at this: it surfaces new
| content to people based on factors other than existing
| popularity.
|
| > far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a
| video roll
|
| I don't think this holds true for most people. PPV TV has
| always been kind of a minor thing, and eclipsed now by
| all-you-can-stream services. The feeling of continually
| inserting coins, or the taxi meter running, is
| uncomfortable to many people.
| mbreese wrote:
| _> PPV TV has always been kind of a minor thing_
|
| This is true, but I think fails to be a good counter-
| example. PPV has always been expensive and focused on
| single events. What we haven't seen is AWS style small
| payments.
|
| Imagine if instead of paying $100/mo for cable TV, we
| could pay $0.25/hr. If you watched TV 24x7, you'd pay
| more, but the vast majority of people would pay much
| less.
|
| The main problem with smaller amount PPV and micro
| transactions in general is that it is hard to get the
| billing/accounting right. But this _is_ something that
| could vendors get right. You only pay for what you use,
| and what you get is billed in small enough increments
| that it makes sense for everyone involved.
|
| How this could be applied to online videos, I'm not sure.
| krapht wrote:
| AWS style small payments existed at coin-operated
| arcades. They're all dead, Jim.
|
| Micropayment news services have existed (Blendle).
| Unpopular.
|
| Pay-as-you-go prepaid cell phone service is also niche.
| So is the a-la-carte gym membership. It's not that
| billing/accounting is difficult. It's that it plain
| straight up makes less money. SAAS vs one-time upgrades,
| etc.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Pay-as-you-go prepaid cell phone service is also niche.
|
| The reason for that is that it's much more expensive than
| paying by the month. I wanted pay-as-you-go specifically
| because I have nearly zero need for cell service, but
| would prefer to be reachable even if I'm not at home.
|
| But you can't get a pay-as-you-go plan with pay-as-you-go
| pricing. T-mobile's monthly plan now is "$15" (actually
| something like $16.60) per month. The pay-as-you-go plan
| would cost less than that, given usage rates, except that
| it also costs $1 for each day you use it to any degree.
| The incredibly high minimum fee overwhelms the already
| small advantage of not paying for service you don't use
| -- as soon as you use _any_ service, you get charged for
| more than a full day of _every_ service, and then you
| have to pay a usage rate on top of that!
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| One problem is that this would deter people from
| watching, as they would only be watching what they want
| to see. Bad for business.
| osmarks wrote:
| It might be somewhat irrational, but I prefer the fixed-
| cost-for-unlimited-use model, as it makes the cost of
| looking at a new thing zero. If I have to pay per use,
| I'll be discouraged from exploring new content I might
| like or might not and will look at things similar to what
| I already see.
| watwut wrote:
| You are in minority I think. Most people dont want to
| micro pay for entertainment.
| Tarsul wrote:
| well youtube has a premium service without ads that
| presumably brings money to the creators. One of the music
| subscription services actually is about to change their
| system so that the money of every subscriber actually
| goes to the artists that THEY listen to (sorry, forgot
| which service it was, not spotify). So, there actually is
| movement in this direction. And with ads becoming ever
| more obnoxious (and privacy threatening) it becomes more
| interesting for users, too.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Let's imagine the video wasn't ad-supported, but instead
| viewers had to pay some money a la carte (and YouTube
| gets a cut of that). Creators would still want to get
| more viewers to make more money, and YouTube would still
| have a recommendation algorithm that used signals such as
| likes, comments, and subscribes to decide what to
| recommend. So I think the ad business model isn't really
| at fault here. Or rather, it's only at fault to the
| extent that it's the only viable business model for a
| video service as large as YouTube.
| notahacker wrote:
| Indeed many YouTube creators already plug the opportunity
| to pay an honest few cents dollars for their content on
| Patreon or their private course website in exactly the
| same way they ask for likes other interactions,
| _especially_ if the nature of their content means they
| don 't see [much] ad revenue.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The ad supported model made sense for newspapers and
| magazines but it doesn't scale. Anytime you obscure the
| price or separate the payer from the benefit you get
| distorted and unforseen consequences. It took scaling
| this model to facebook levels before the failure reared
| its head and it is indeed much worse than we had ever
| predicted.
| CraneWorm wrote:
| Why should content creators (or anyone else) have to earn
| money to live?
| imglorp wrote:
| Ah, the Roddenberry universe. I think that will begin
| after the cost of clean, limitless energy approaches
| zero. At that point anyone can turn dirt into a house or
| a hamburger so compensation becomes much less of a
| concern.
| scollet wrote:
| Just have to avoid the preceding world war.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| For those downvoting Parents comment, in Star Trek canon,
| a 3rd world preceded the creation of a unified planet.
| flycaliguy wrote:
| Yeah, occasionally a reputable channel will show how many
| views are from non subscribers and it's a pretty massive
| ratio. These creators aren't begging, they are just trying
| to carve out an audience.
| tyfon wrote:
| It works really well actually.
|
| Personally I refuse to do this and my channel on youtube
| still grows but it is probably growing a lot slower than if
| I had been begging.
|
| Since I do it for fun and not profit I couldn't give a damn
| though.
| asddubs wrote:
| There's this minecraft youtuber I've been following for
| ages, who has been on youtube for like 10 years and still
| doesn't ask for likes or subscribes (ethoslab).
| Especially in that space the absence of it is remarkable,
| I haven't found anyone else who does this. Occasionally
| he does collabs and the collaborators will do it, and you
| can really see that it does work, it makes a big
| difference.
| tyfon wrote:
| Yep I know him.
|
| He is the only one I can think of that doesn't do this
| and it makes me personally much more inclined to watch
| him. He also feels "uncommercial" even after 10 years I
| think it's fantastic that he is able to keep it that way.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Is there evidence to show that it actually works? Me I
| instinctively want to close the window anytime a Youtuber
| asks me to "smash that like button and hit the notification
| bell" 5 seconds into the video. At a minimum I think less
| of the Youtuber and am less likely to recommend them to
| friends. Some of the fastest growing and most popular
| channels never beg their viewers for likes/subs.
| est31 wrote:
| The average youtube user and the average hn user are two
| very different populations. Things like ads etc don't
| make me buy things, at least in most instances. But they
| are effective, otherwise companies wouldn't make ad
| campaigns. They are just not meant for me.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I also hate this, but if people don't ask, they don't
| get, and typically those who don't end up with far fewer
| subscriptions. After a while they get demoralized and
| give up.
|
| While I haven't taken time to measure this out to
| academic standards, it's extremely obvious in niche
| interest channels - eg I'm into synthesizers, and there's
| a whole little subsystem of review videos, technique
| videos, not-talking demos, jam sessions etc. The more
| heavily branded/self-promoting presenters tend to get
| vastly more views. My favorite reviewer centers the
| equipment under review and makes occasional appearances
| talking to the camera, but his maximum views tends to be
| near the average minimum for reviewers who center
| themselves, eg always being on-screen in a box, mirror,
| or direct-to-camera shot and always showing their face
| and a relevant emotional reaction to the subject of the
| video in the poster frame. I'm sure the same patterns
| play out in many other specialist topics.
|
| To some extent this may be a product of the Infamous
| Algorithm, but it might also reflect cognitive
| preferences of viewers in that many people prefer to have
| information mediated by a recognizable presenter whose
| reactions and emphases become more meaningful with
| repeated views, while others like me find an overly-
| expressive presenter distracts from the material under
| discussion and gravitate towards a more
| subdued/restrained communication style.
|
| In _Understanding Media_ , Marshall McLuhan distinguishes
| between 'hot' and 'cool' media which employ more or less
| intensity to solicit and maintain attention. 'Hot' styles
| with a charismatic and overtly solicitous presenter seem
| to be more popular in general, so even people who don't
| like that style may end up adopting it to gain viewership
| in a competitive market. There might be a market
| opportunity here for catering to different kinds of
| viewers, eg a 'CoolTube' for people who strongly prefer a
| more low-key presentation format.
|
| Incidentally, I sometimes _do_ prefer hot 'in-your-face'
| sort of media, especially on things like experimental
| music videos or the occasional guilty pleasure of a
| cheesy monster movie. It's just a hunch, but it seems to
| depend on things like a rapid tempo of editing and high
| levels of discontinuity/unpredictability rather than
| spatial maximalism.
| [deleted]
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| its not bizarre, its obvious and depressing that people beat
| around the bush about it. sex sells, a tale as old as time.
| im sick of people feigning ignorance to topics like this like
| some ditzy 50s era housewives trying to play suburban
| politics
| fl0wenol wrote:
| For me it's when they do that faux: "hey guys, I was looking
| at my metrics and <insert percentage here>% of you who viewed
| the last X videos aren't subscribed, so it would be really
| great if you hit that bell"
|
| I mean really? Do creators realize that viewers could be
| interested in several dozen channels and don't want to swamp
| out their own notifications since Youtube's prioritization
| gets shittier the more you subscribe to? Sorry you aren't in
| my top 10? Maybe a video got popular on an algorithmic
| whim...
|
| I'd much rather they ask me to join a Patreon, which I am
| very keen to do if the content is good and continues to do
| so. But pulling that "peek behind the creator curtain" crap
| puts me very off because it's like trying to shame you into
| behaving differently as if you're part of the problem.
|
| No... you decided to make Youtube your source of income. I
| don't owe you crap.
| wruza wrote:
| Sometimes content is good and I feel I owe them crap. But
| exactly! Youtube recommendation system is so cretinous and
| only gets worse that sometimes I end up adding videos to a
| special playlist that I can consult later and check a
| channel without subscribing. Clicking something state-
| changing on youtube as a viewer is like eating a trash food
| that seems tasty, but you'll regret that later.
|
| It's actually a problem with all "favorites" on every
| platform. A browser bookmark system with notifications (a
| little dot) would be great, because then you can
| sort/categorize/describe/thimbnail/speeddial it, but
| platforms crave for stupidity and make it a non-
| configurable list instead.
| robenkleene wrote:
| If you're curious why asking for subscribers is so prevalent,
| I recommend taking a look at this Twitter thread
| (https://twitter.com/stalman/status/1369082704138883073) that
| describes the before and after effects of asking for
| subscribers, here's a quote: "Just the subs that came
| directly from the video page were 5x what they are on similar
| size videos".
|
| I also recommend this blog post about the best way to ask for
| subscribers: https://reneritchie.net/how-to-get-subscribers-
| on-youtube-ev...
|
| I've never done any of these things, and I'm not sure I have
| the stomach for it, but I consider it required knowledge for
| anyone with any interest in leveraging online attention.
| _jal wrote:
| I completely understand the pressures that lead to people
| begging in videos.
|
| My point was simply that I find it unappealing pleasure
| viewing, so I don't understand wanting to watch them do it.
| rchaud wrote:
| Without a subscription, the visibility of their content is at
| the mercy of the algorithm. What choice do they have? It's no
| different from subscribing to someone's email list. It's
| annoying, but nobody bookmarks anything these days.
| seph-reed wrote:
| It would be quite funny to make a "facebook" that automatically
| transforms everyones photos in a similar way. Such that
| everybody becomes attractive.
| heldrida wrote:
| True! Unless you are a 50 year old uncle who looks Lenny
| Kravitz.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Every day I give thanks that I live under a system of
| government that protects the individual from the wishes of the
| majority. It's not perfect of course, but it does work.
|
| No doubt people felt good about following "her" because of her
| authenticity.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Just curious, where do you live and how hard is to immigrate
| there?
| everdrive wrote:
| Part of it's just the medium. Uncles write lots of good books,
| I imagine they teach lots of great classes. I've seen plenty
| who have great youtube channels or podcasts. But, instagram
| (and services like it) is all about aesthetics and nothing
| else.
| NietTim wrote:
| However nobody can deny that his hair is amazing
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| It was probably so successful precisely because it was seeing
| the world through the eyes of a 50 year old Japanese biker with
| the face people expect in influencers.
|
| Most young people aren't that interesting. Older people tend to
| be more interesting, but no one wants to look at them.
|
| It's like when movies show Charlie's Angels or James Bond
| fluently speaking multiple languages and efficiently wielding
| various weapons and skiing like Olympic skiers. You know that's
| not real. Any one of those things takes all your time to
| master. But it makes for a cool movie to bundle them all
| together.
|
| And maybe people fell for it in part because we watch nonsense
| like James Bond. So it hit that note and didn't immediately set
| off alarm bells.
| bshimmin wrote:
| I like to think James Bond is terrible at DIY and cooking, at
| least.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Actual reality:
|
| James Bond is like The Dread Pirate Roberts and gets played
| by someone new every few years. Only the name stays the
| same.
| [deleted]
| justicezyx wrote:
| ...
|
| Maybe this Maybe that
|
| This type of argument is toxic. Adds little to the
| conversation. If you can back any of these maybes that would
| be great...
| ce4 wrote:
| Exactly. The one thing I immediately noticed was the ~30 year
| old vintage Yamaha TZR 2-stroke model complete with pics of
| open engine etc (check the small diameter exhaust pipes).
| Which youngster would ride such a bike, let alone touch its
| internals? This stuff is very niche, maybe not so much in
| Japan but over here in Europe you would have to search for it
| or pay some decent money to get it in that condition. The
| owner probably has bought it in his 20s :)
|
| Edit: the power output curve is also not for the faint of
| heart and there's no electronic helpers, overall very
| different to ride compared to a current 600cc model with all
| the bells and whistles :-)
| bredren wrote:
| > Most young people aren't that interesting.
|
| They are not, but I think people will get better at realizing
| this the way many now know what it means for something to be
| "photoshopped" whether they can identify it and subsequently
| dismiss it or not.
|
| I believe that physical "good" looks, analytical and social
| intelligence, trade and athletic skill, and artistic talent
| will eventually converge as our future "stars."
| seph-reed wrote:
| I worry that the norm is moving more towards specialist and
| away from generalist. Things have been pretty stable for a
| while. And people who invest ridiculous amounts of energy
| in stuff like _the stock market_ or _social media_ tend to
| get serious returns.
|
| Those are not truly useful skills anywhere except this one
| ecosystem.
| katmannthree wrote:
| To be fair, a very large chunk of old people are likewise
| uninteresting. Aside from the general dulling of the mind
| that comes with age, you have to actually do things with
| those years for them to mean something.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| And you need opportunity to do it, and other people need to
| find it appealing. You could do 1 of the 10 old / young
| people tropes and get clicks.
|
| "Meaning something" personally and "being interesting" are
| not the same.
|
| Also there isn't that much wrong with just exploiting
| popularity machine. So a bunch of people thought you were a
| young girl, and you're not... who cares! If anything you
| are teaching people to stop putting so much credence into
| the SM sphere... which can only be good.
| unishark wrote:
| Ahem they said "older", not old. 50 is middle aged.
|
| Even if a person is a simple product of their times, as one
| gets older that gets increasingly interesting. Because the
| times change so much over the years.
| [deleted]
| superfrank wrote:
| > It was probably so successful precisely because it was
| seeing the world through the eyes of a 50 year old Japanese
| biker with the face people expect in influencers.
|
| I can't read Japanese and I used Google translate for the
| post text (so maybe there's more depth that's lost in
| translation), but the pictures look to be pretty "generic
| influencer". None of those pictures look any different than
| what you would expect from a random 20 something influencer.
| Additionally, the text on the tweet is pretty much "I like
| motorcycles" along with "her" age and height. Everything here
| seems to be pretty much the same "here's a pretty girl in
| front of something" post that instagram is full of.
|
| Again, I'm only going off the pictures and Google translate,
| so if someone who understands the culture better wants to
| correct me, feel free, but until that happens, I'm going to
| believe there's nothing more to this than a bunch of people
| wanting to look at a pretty girl.
|
| Edit: Ran the tweet in the article through DeepL at the
| suggestion of some replies. Here's the translation so you all
| can come to your own conclusions:
|
| 9 Everyone!
|
| Do you have a bike?
|
| Spring will be here soon
|
| Age: Showa era
|
| Height:166
|
| Lives in Ibaraki Kumamoto
|
| I love to tinker with motorcycles
|
| Comment: Life is once, play this world
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I don't know anything about motorcycles. I wouldn't trust
| Google translate because one of my son's hobbies is looking
| up the original Japanese (and translation notes, etc) for
| anime and other works to figure out what in the heck went
| wrong with the translation because Japanese culture has all
| these honorifics that English lacks and that goes weird
| places, along with the gender neutral pronouns, among other
| things.
|
| If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles,
| motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot
| of really important details that are utterly lost on you.
| csa wrote:
| > If you know nothing of the language, culture,
| motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess
| there are a lot of really important details that are
| utterly lost on you.
|
| I know bikes, I know Japanese, and I lived and road in
| Japan.
|
| The translation is largely accurate (just minor
| structural stuff that doesn't matter).
|
| The only content that might matter, and it doesn't really
| seem to, are the hashtags for the tweet that were not
| covered above (roughly "connect with bikers" and "quick
| biker self-intro").
|
| While I agree with your general characterization of
| Google translate when dealing with Japanese content, in
| this case it did a decent job, largely because the
| content was very simple and straightforward.
| superfrank wrote:
| I agree with you about Google translate not being
| perfect. I actually wrote most of my comment up before
| running it through translate. Even without the text, none
| of those pictures seem especially deep, so even taking
| the text out of the equation, I still stand by my
| comment.
|
| That being said, this is the Google translation of the
| tweet in the article:
|
| Minasan 9 (^o^) 6 Do you have a motorcycle? Spring is
| coming soon Age: Showa *** Height: 166 Living: Ibaraki I
| love: messing around with bikes
|
| Like I said in my last comment, I know Google translate
| is far from perfect and I'm very open to being proven
| wrong, but I have a hard time believing that there's some
| deep insight in this post when that is what Google
| translate put put out. The translation seems pretty
| "influencer" to me.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I've been up all night and I feel awful and I'm not
| trying to pick a fight here. I'm just thinking of some
| novel I read where some nouveau riche fool paid someone
| for their riding boots because his were too new looking
| and he wanted to look like he had been riding a long
| time. He wanted worn-looking boots. He didn't want to
| look like it was his first time.
|
| And the guy took his money with a straight face and sold
| him the boots even though the color of the boots signaled
| he was a trainer or something, which is something the
| nouveau riche guy had no way of knowing. But it would
| have been immediately laughable to most people who were
| in the know.
|
| I am not going to go through the account and try to make
| up BS, but the bike may be custom built, the gear he's
| wearing may be amazingly good, the locations he is
| posting from may be something incredibly special in some
| way and not commenting on those details may be part of
| the appeal.
|
| I'm a writer by trade and I get paid by the word and also
| have to meet other constraints and you can sometimes say
| very little with three paragraphs or you can say a metric
| fuck ton with a few well-chosen words.
|
| I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just
| know that when things get popular, it is often due to
| some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks
| about. The fact that it gets slipped in and _not_
| commented on is part of what makes some things wildly
| popular.
|
| A density of quality info and yadda is often some element
| of that and that is often not obvious to outsiders who
| cannot readily tell that _this_ photo is some superficial
| tripe and _that_ seemingly similar one is worlds apart in
| quality, data, informativeness, whatever.
|
| Anyway: This is my insomnia talking. It is absolutely not
| intended to be ugly or pick a fight or yadda.
|
| You have a great day/night/whatever.
| antonvs wrote:
| > The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on
| is part of what makes some things wildly popular.
|
| A dogwhistle, basically? "Dog whistles use language which
| appears normal to the majority, but which communicate
| specific things to intended audiences."
|
| Dogwhistles are most often associated with politics, but
| the idea goes beyond that (unless you classify all
| asymmetric/broadcasted communication as political, which
| is not without merit.)
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Eh, more like subtext for things people aren't
| necessarily consciously aware of.
| sam1r wrote:
| Which is why I believe the best you can do is stay aware
| of the present at a meta level, and track things as a
| function of time.
|
| Of course all of this requires self-drive and personal
| determination / willingness.
| superfrank wrote:
| The original comment I was replying to was claiming that
| the account might have been successful because it
| presented the wisdom of a 50 year old with the face of a
| 20 year old.
|
| All the examples you gave are totally possible. There may
| be something about the bike or the locations being
| visited that are special, I really don't know. Even if
| that is the case, that's not really what OP was claiming
| and not really what I was responding to.
|
| There are tons of little reasons this account could be
| popular, but based on the little research I did, I don't
| think it's because "she" is making posts full of wisdom,
| years beyond "her" age.
| sam1r wrote:
| >>> I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I
| just know that when things get popular, it is often due
| to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks
| about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented
| on is part of what makes some things wildly popular
|
| ^^ this
|
| Thank you. Wish I could pay you per word for this.
| Hmu@samir.ist
| csa wrote:
| > None of those pictures look any different than what you
| would expect from a random 20 something influencer.
|
| Fwiw, being born in the Showa era (ended Jan 89) would put
| her at 31 as a minimum.
|
| Minor nitpick, but I just noticed the Showa ?? birth year
| in the tweet, and that would have raised red flags for me.
| Even for Japan, the doctored pic doesn't really look 31,
| much less mid-30s or older.
|
| Edit: Your translation is mostly correct (The second line
| is more like "Do you bike?", but it sounds more natural in
| Japanese).
|
| Note that this tweet also has a self-intro for
| motorcyclists hashtag.
| f00zz wrote:
| There's a lot of motorcycle geeking in that twitter
| account, e.g. https://twitter.com/azusagakuyuki/status/1365
| 132939135127552
| fuzxi wrote:
| DeepL tends to be better than Google Translate for Japanese
| <-> English translation, btw.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I have never heard of this. Link? How does it do for
| French-English?
| tchalla wrote:
| DeepL is pretty great for most European languages. Here's
| a comment on difficult French text from a previous HN
| submission [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15123833
| Semaphor wrote:
| deepl.com it's usually better than Google for everything
| it supports. Though Google has been catching up.
| superfrank wrote:
| Oh, good to know. I ran it through there and there are
| some differences, but it's not much deeper. I'm adding
| the translation to my original comment.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > You know that's not real.
|
| You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if
| you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun
| safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom
| dancing.
| djmips wrote:
| cross country skiing? Shouldn't it be downhill?
| a4isms wrote:
| Both movies and books agree it's downhill. Also what we
| would call "skeleton" today. And if you go by the books,
| a course in Bentley repair is not necessary because James
| "has a guy."
| [deleted]
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| What college are you people going to? I never saw any of
| these, not even as clubs, at Waterloo.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Cornell. The specific classes are:
|
| Introduction to Wines:
| https://sha.cornell.edu/admissions-
| programs/undergraduate/ac...
|
| Introduction to Handgun Safety: https://courses.cornell.e
| du/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...
|
| Cross Country Skiing: https://scl.cornell.edu/coe/pe-
| courses/spring-pe-courses/sno...
|
| Swedish Massage: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_cour
| se_nopop.php?catoid=...
|
| Ballroom Dance: https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster
| /SP20/class/PE/1153
|
| Of course the advantage of going to Waterloo is that you
| can probably pass the Google coding interviews.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| I thought you were joking, but handgun safety really is a
| college class... Just wow.
| realityking wrote:
| Svalbad University has an, AFAIK mandatory, course that
| includes learning hot to shoot a rifle:
| https://www.unis.no/course/as-101-arctic-survival-and-
| safety...
|
| In most of Svalbad you need to carry a rifle to defend
| yourself against polar bears.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| It makes sense, given there are academic fields where a
| gun might be needed. E.g. if your research involves
| inventorying songbirds in the jungles of Colombia or
| whatever. Even in the U.S. a lot of mycologists carry
| weapons, so if they get shot at while accidentally
| stumbling on an illegal weed grow or whatever they can
| shoot back.
| unishark wrote:
| The description looks like it's about competition, not
| just safety, akin to a class on poker. Perhaps the title
| is a bit of spin for defensive reasons.
| stilley2 wrote:
| "I would found an institution where any person can find
| instruction in any study." -Ezra Cornell.
|
| I'm not sure if they're offered anymore, but they used to
| have Basic Rifle Marksmanship and Epee de Guerre. My
| friend once told me he thought my major was "weapons".
| phillc73 wrote:
| I clearly wasted my time with English Lit, Modern
| European History, Linguistics and German in my first year
| at University!
| reaperducer wrote:
| Don't feel bad. I wasted my time with Soviet Studies.
| Oops.
| jascii wrote:
| Something tells me that that is still pretty relevant...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I mean, Cornell is an Ivy, not a regional school.
| jebeng wrote:
| > at Waterloo.
|
| That's your problem, but at you had:
|
| Underwater Linux .iso Distributing
|
| The Computational Fluid Dynamics of(strictly
| hypothetical) Human Sexual Intercourse in a Canoe
|
| Outdoor Code Golf(Winter Session)
|
| "E-Sports"
| DC1350 wrote:
| > Human Sexual Intercourse
|
| That's not the Waterloo that I know
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I took Introduction to Wine Science as my 'non
| engineering' course. Lab component was tasting - but you
| had to spit it out.
|
| It was one of the hardest courses I took at university -
| so much memorization of various wine regions around the
| world, grape varietals, etc.
| kbenson wrote:
| Completely ignores political science, economics and
| physics? Checks out. ;)
| antonvs wrote:
| James Bond can't afford to worry about physics when he's
| skiing off the edge of a mountain onto the top of a
| plane.
| cobookman wrote:
| Wouldn't that require an understanding of physics to
| properly make his landing :D
| WalterBright wrote:
| It does work if we're living in a simulation.
| samatman wrote:
| "Is a Mongolian horse archer applying physics even though
| he has no idea what physics is and it hasn't even been
| invented yet" is a pretty deep philosophical rabbit hole.
| aksss wrote:
| In the same way that one can appreciate good wine without
| having memorized the names of all the world's grape
| varieties.
| frenchy wrote:
| Understanding physics wouldn't cut it, what you really
| need is a generous dose of plot armor.
| jnsie wrote:
| Absolutely not! If he understood physics he would
| understand that the landing is impossible, and would
| therefore die in the attempt. That he doesn't know the
| landing is impossible is what makes it possible, and he
| lives. Simple.
| a_t48 wrote:
| Ahh, the Hitchiker's Guide method.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college
| if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun
| safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom
| dancing.
|
| Pretty sure James Bond's handgun use is more on the unsafe
| side of things. I mean, he does have a license to kill and
| uses it frequently.
| aksss wrote:
| nit: "deadly" is not "unsafe". You can be perfectly safe
| in your firearm handling and still wield the power to
| kill other beings. "Unsafe" presents the risk of being
| _unintentionally_ deadly, but being _intentionally_
| deadly is perfectly compatible with being safe in the gun
| 's handling.
| [deleted]
| martinflack wrote:
| Sigh. Where was this wisdom when I was an undergrad...!
| [deleted]
| jmgrosen wrote:
| Not sure whether I'd prefer to be Bond, or a pirate:
| archery, fencing, pistol, and sailing.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Bond. Simply for the hygiene.
| [deleted]
| aksss wrote:
| I think Bond is good with a sailing yacht, pistol, and
| fencing. Just missing the archery unless some Bond nerd
| wants to point to some Bond archery (and I'd believe it).
| WalterBright wrote:
| You're not going to learn ballroom dancing in a semester.
|
| By learning it I mean being proficient with it that you're
| smooth and comfortable with it, and can make your partner
| look good.
| usehackernews wrote:
| The point of the James Bond semester is more so about the
| lack of learning
| nerdponx wrote:
| Waste of school tuition perhaps, but certainly not time
| wasted learning any of those skills.
| [deleted]
| polote wrote:
| > The majority of "influencers" are young women,
|
| Just to add on that.
|
| "Though women make up 77% of the influencer market, male
| influencers are paid almost 100% more. " [1]
|
| And 88% of female influencers are less than 34 years old. [2]
|
| So 67 % of influencers are young women (if 34 years old is
| considered young)
|
| Also women get 10 times more like than men [3]
|
| [1] https://klear.com/blog/influencer-pricing-2019/
|
| [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/893733/share-
| influencers...
|
| [3] https://www.influencerbay.com/blog/the-future-of-
| influence-i...
| greiskul wrote:
| I would like more data for [1], with a breakdown per gender
| of each category and size. The data they show could be under
| the effect of a Simpsons paradox from the way they present
| it.
| pojzon wrote:
| Sorry but I have to ask - all 76 genders ?
|
| I find that discussion extremely hilarious.
| jedberg wrote:
| > male influencers are paid almost 100% more
|
| This isn't entirely surprising. They're much more rare so
| there is lot more competition for their services, piled on
| top of the usual biases in our society against paying women
| equally.
| diydsp wrote:
| > Women charge an average of $351 while Men charge $459.[1]
|
| That's 31% more, not almost 100% more.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I can't see the full data, but as I assume they didn't just
| blatantly make that up men also likely receive more deals.
| In normal business terms, women would get 31% less per hour
| and also x fewer hours.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| There is clearly some nuance here, that they aren't
| making clear in order to headline "most surprising
| result" without context.
| mattigames wrote:
| > "Though women make up 77% of the influencer market, male
| influencers are paid almost 100% more. " [1]
|
| But thats how suply-and-demand workforce always work doesn't
| it? Too much people doing the same job tends to lower the
| wage for that job; and because a lot of companies compite for
| different markets when sponsoring a male influencers vs
| female influencers (e.g. "this is the shaving cream I use" vs
| "this is the bra's brand I use") they are income-wise 2
| different jobs.
| vmception wrote:
| lol, and yeah it worked.
|
| I also don't think there is an issue here.
| arkh wrote:
| > 50 year old uncle
|
| Also, 50 year old people tend to have ideas which are frowned
| upon in the Valley. Especially if they're not from the US.
|
| So when enough people start following them, they get removed.
| vecinu wrote:
| Can you give some examples of what you're referring to? I'm
| drawing a blank.
| arkh wrote:
| > Don't marry, don't cohabit and even avoid dating women.
|
| Now you're an alt-right sexist person and anyone
| subscribing to your channel is one step away from shooting
| a school.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Showed this to my wife. Her reply? "makes sense. Women do the
| inverse if they want to be taken seriously in business".
|
| I remember reading an article in the French press, about two
| women founders that mailed the off-site dev team under the
| moniker of Mike and Bob.
|
| They were fed up with being second guessed on business
| decisions and had found out that 'Bob' was getting less
| pushback than 'Marissa'.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I think you're right, sans the bit about human nature.
| Traditionally influence is a function of understanding and
| wisdom, and that is a function of time and years.
|
| The internet changed that.
|
| Now it's a function of perceived popularity and perceived
| influence. That has become a (cheap?) proxy. It's not the
| person per se, but the "social proof" attached to that person.
|
| We've been trained to use quantity instead of quality. Is that
| human nature?
|
| Attacted to a pretty face? Yes. That is human nature.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Beauty is a skill like any other that has both a factor of
| talent and training to hone it, that, as with many skills,
| declines with age.
|
| It happens to be a skill that influences require for their
| work.
|
| Here, I see no problem; where I see a problem is that often
| those who hire judge those on their beauty where their beauty
| would play no factor in their performance, not only hurting
| those whom they would hire, but their own finances in the
| processes.
|
| Of course, the scariest part of all is how much more easily the
| ugly are found guilty on the same level of evidence than the
| beautiful.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > The majority of "influencers" are young women
|
| Is this actually true, or just bias from your own interessts?
| If we look at technical stuff and gaming, we see far more
| successful male influencers. Similar with entertainment-
| industry.
|
| > and only a minority would want to follow a 50 year old
|
| This more or less is true, because not many like to see
| unattractive people doing boring things. But the point here is,
| this in not because of gender or sex, it's about the quality of
| content and chemistry with the consumers. An old ugly guy
| without any real skill, would be usually as unsuccesful as an
| old ugly woman without any real skill. Though, for both there
| always is chance to find niche to sellout your content over
| something, the chance is pretty low.
|
| With younger and more attractive people, the chances are
| significant higher, because they have more selling points
| besides the content itself, thus they sell better. But it also
| depends on the target-group and content.
|
| > it's human nature
|
| No, it's human culture. People sell according to the crowds
| reception on what the gender is suposed to do. So woman sell
| better in female-stuff, men better with manly stuff. Woman do
| have a slight advantage, in that they are the gender which in
| most cultures is educated from early days to sellout. They
| dress up, use fancy cloths, catter to the people, etc. This
| works better for laymen when becoming influencers, because
| woman have more likely the skills to sell themself on a broader
| are, while most men need to learn it first.
| watwut wrote:
| > Though, for both there always is chance to find niche to
| sellout your content over something, the chance is pretty
| low.
|
| In both cases, I think it would be fair to call that niche
| real skill.
| tsdlts wrote:
| > Women sell better in female stuff
|
| Cute women doing traditionally "male things" sells like hot
| cakes. Not so much the other way around.
| nix23 wrote:
| >Cute women doing traditionally "male things" sells like
| hot cakes.
|
| True, but are really bad in selling serious Business stuff.
| cambalache wrote:
| Are they?...Take the girls from BoutineLA (an Instagram
| account), give them some training and send them to sell
| B2B, I would bet easily on their potential returns
| war1025 wrote:
| > The majority of "influencers" are young women, and only a
| minority would want to follow a 50 year old uncle.
|
| One interesting side effect of this is that some of the most
| popular male YouTube channels I follow never show the host's
| face. Everything is carefully staged to only show their hands /
| body.
| [deleted]
| neom wrote:
| i've spent more time that I would care to admit trying to
| find a slip up reflection form Lock Picking Lawyer. So far no
| dice.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Its not that hard to find the guy, Google better.
| Hitton wrote:
| Youtubers are mostly content creators, while most instagram
| "influencers" only try to look pretty.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Its strange because random old people channels produce great
| content. Its just that, most of them don't try to be annoying
| influencers. I follow some old dude who repairs his
| motorcycle and writes music. He doesnt talk, and its great.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I follow some guy in France who restore random stuff, he
| doesn't talk and there's no music, it's fantastic.
| rchaud wrote:
| Very true. I came across a channel run by a 60 something
| man where he sits in his music room, puts on a record and
| talks about what that piece of music means to him, when he
| first heard it.
|
| I usually don't watch the whole video as it can get a bit
| dry, but otherwise it is nice to just see someone
| expressing themself without shilling their Patreon or using
| clickbait thumbnails and titles like the more commercial
| "personal" channels do.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I miss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Carrington
| 's show, which was basically that on BBC radio. Him, his
| cat, and a huge collection of old records.
|
| (BBC radio is at the very opposite end from begging for
| likes; once someone establishes a show, if it's not in a
| highly contended timeslot it can basically run forever no
| matter how obscure or unfashionable it is, until the
| presenter dies)
| rchaud wrote:
| RIP John Peel. Remarkable how many iconic
| punk/indie/weird bands he introduced to the mainstream.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Doesn't that sort of depend on the channel? eg Radio 1
| has always been Obnoxiously! Trendy! Pop! Music!, Radio 2
| a lightweight blend of news, musical standards, and
| entertainment, Radio 3 classical or music and Very
| Serious Discourse, and Radio 4 intellectual topics,
| politics, and and quality news, little or no music. I
| know there are a few other radio channels but I can't
| remember what their focus is. And of course all of these
| channels have variations of their own depending what time
| of the day/week people are listening.
| mos_basik wrote:
| Sounds like my kind of thing. Got a link?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av3gmXBuBS0&t=557s
| antihero wrote:
| It's so refreshing to have content that is actually just
| good content and isn't some trainwreck of seeking attention
| from an increasingly more vapid audience.
| lsllc wrote:
| This Old Tony? (highly recommended btw!)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/user/featony
|
| Although there was one where you did get to see his face.
| sly010 wrote:
| There is one (!!!) video where he shows his face. He looks
| more like 35 to me. Unless of course he is a Japanese girl
| using whatsapp.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| AvE (Arduino vs Evil) is similar
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA
| michaelt wrote:
| This Old Tony? Just hands.
|
| AvE? Just hands.
|
| Marco Reps? Just hands... wearing gloves.
|
| LockPickingLawyer? Just hands.
|
| BosnianBill? Just hands.
|
| The Signal Path? Largely just hands, although he has
| appeared occasionally.
|
| Wendover Productions? Disembodied voice.
|
| CGP Grey? Disembodied voice.
|
| Real Engineering? Disembodied voice.
|
| Not to mention innumerable video game streamers.
|
| Of course, disembodied voices aren't in-and-of-themselves a
| new cultural phenomenon: Radio has existed for years, as
| have podcasts. And there are TV formats like nature and
| history documentaries where the narrator may rarely or
| never appear on screen.
|
| And even on Youtube, there are a number of female voice-
| only celebrities - for example "vtubers", where a female
| voice actor plays games while pretending to be a cute anime
| girl. Of course, one could say that's an example _for_ the
| theory people want to see beautiful women, not _against_
| yumraj wrote:
| And the ones where I've seen men are related to DIY fixing
| things at home, where an old plumber is more trusted then a
| young one.
| watwut wrote:
| Arent youtube channels generally male dominated? At least
| most of what I watch is by males and they are not ashamed to
| show their faces.
|
| I watch art, some crafts occasionally tech and pop
| commentary. Some sport.
|
| I dont see people being interested in 50 years old women
| either in general.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| It's also the incongruence which people like I think.
|
| It would be great to see Adolfo Mateo[0] as a 20 year old
| Japanese girl, not that he needs any improvement as he is.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES
| the_arun wrote:
| I wish people use this trick to create dent in the universe.
| For eg. use face of pretty young girls to bring positive
| changes in the planet - assuming everyone wants to follow young
| girls & believe in what they say.
| krapht wrote:
| They do it in Japan. Everything has a cute anime mascot.
| m4rtink wrote:
| It's actually a pretty useful in practice!
|
| Say you need a safety warning tables for your railway
| station - pandas dangerously fussing with selfie sticks on
| a crowded platform are much more enjoyable and memorable
| than just some more generic stick figures doing the same.
|
| You can also encode culture into mascots - everyone
| probably knows the bear mascot Kumamon (yes, there are many
| bears in Kumamoto and they occasionally eat somebody) but
| take forever example Shimaneko, the mascot of the Shimano
| pprefecture. Neko means cat and indeed its a cat mascot -
| with a strange hat! And that hat is the roof of the ancient
| and famous Izumo shrine located in the Shimano prefecture.
|
| Or the even more obscure Kinosaki Kounori: https://mobile.t
| witter.com/jrw_fukuchiyama/status/1046927976...
|
| On the picture you can see a young female anime character
| in a summer kimono (yukata).
|
| This is the mascot of a limitted express train (!) that
| goes from Osaka and Kyoto to the famous onsen (hot spring)
| town of Kinosaki (hence the Kinosaki in the name). The the
| other name Kounori is from the name of the train, Kou no
| tori - oriental white stork.
|
| Which goes right back to the founding legend of Kinosaki
| about how they built the first bath after observing a stork
| using the natural hot spring to heal its wounds.
|
| And the last thing - the summer kimono/yukata. If you look
| closely she also has a ticket stamping tool and a railway
| company employee badge - that's because station employees
| really do wear yukata in the summer in Kinosaki instead of
| their usual uniforms! :)
|
| And the kimono pattern includes of course the oriental
| white stork but also - fireworks! And that's because of
| course in the summer there are regular fireworks shows in
| Kinosaki! :)
|
| Really some much culture and symbolism (not to mention hard
| work!) goes to japanese mascot characters!
| lscharen wrote:
| Lest people forget the OS-tan trend of the early 2000's.
|
| https://www.ostan-
| collections.net/wiki/index.php/List_of_Can...
| wruza wrote:
| Sounds like a great idea for politicians at the next election
| cycle everywhere. Don't believe in what they say though. I
| mean... both.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Here's one example: https://grist.org/energy/this-radiant-
| model-wants-you-to-sto...
| aksss wrote:
| I'm still sorting out what we really mean when we keep
| referring to the guy as "an uncle". Is he also a father? Is he
| married? What's the description of "uncle" adding or informing
| us of? My immediate reaction makes me think he's a 50yo with no
| kids, maybe a girlfriend, but his sister had kids. I don't know
| that this is an accurate perception or if it even aligns with
| how other people read it. Just seems kind of weird that he's
| summarized as this title.
| viraptor wrote:
| "An uncle" is just a way to refer to someone mature,
| unrelated to family connections. Kind of like the popular
| "Uncle Roger" https://www.youtube.com/c/mrnigelng (usually
| I'd expect a "generic uncle" to have no family of his own)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I don't know if they're literally uncles, but men in that age-
| range like Elon Musk, Louis Cole, Joe Rogan, brooklyn dad
| defiant, Donald Trump, etc. are huge influencers (orders of
| magnitude more so than @azusagakuyuki). It's a bit handwave-y
| to say "nobody wants to see an uncle".
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah, that's my take. You see it often in other areas too -
| it's a lot easier to get thousands of followers as an
| attractive person (especially an attractive young woman, but it
| works for men too). The ability to more easily build a large
| audience and then leverage that is huge (and can make a ton of
| money).
|
| My general heuristic is online personas from attractive people
| are often over valued (specifically considering the value of
| things they say/do - not their ability to make money which is
| huge) and when you compare pretty people with high follower
| numbers to unattractive people (or just people that don't lead
| with their prettiness) with high follower numbers, the latter
| are often better quality/say more interesting things. Someone
| leading with their prettiness has a big advantage in getting
| attention, even if what they say is dumb.
|
| There's a lot of pseudo-intellectualized bullshit on twitter
| that gets a lot more attention than it would otherwise because
| the person is young and pretty, but would not get nearly the
| same attention if they looked different.
|
| It reminds me a lot of Liking What You See: A Documentary,
| which is the last Ted Chiang story in his first short story
| collection - I think it's worth reading.
|
| Obviously attractiveness is only one factor among many, but I
| suspect it's a much bigger factor than people currently think.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > nobody want's to see an uncle
|
| I think it depends of your style. Of course I wouldn't want to
| see an uncle if I were looking for sexy girls being rad, but I
| would love to see a 50yo uncle tell biking stories, motorcycle
| repair, or his brand of manly zen.
|
| Definitely no one wants to see an uncle posing as a young girl,
| and I am also intrigued by why did an uncle wanted that badly
| to feel admired on Twitter in the first place. Someone younger
| I would understand.
| godelski wrote:
| Rather think about "What portion of the population wants to
| follow a sexy girl on a bike?" vs "What portion of the
| population wants to follow an uncle?" rather than "does a
| population that wants to follow an uncle exist?" I think it
| is pretty clear that the size of the group that wants to
| follow the sexy girl is larger than the group that wants to
| follow the uncle. Larger audience to be able to pull from.
| golemiprague wrote:
| That's not entirely correct, there are many male influencers,
| you will just find them in youtube rather than instagram,
| usually compiling serious and valuable content, especially when
| it comes to cars and bikes.
|
| It is just that women do what they always do and men do what
| they always do, women present themselves, men do the work.
| bawolff wrote:
| Not to put to fine a point on it, but aren't influencers
| essentially a type of very soft-core porn? I don't think they
| really expose people to world views, superficial or otherwise.
| danso wrote:
| Of the adults on this top 26 list of Youtube accounts, only 1
| is a woman, and she has less than a third of Pewdiepie's
| subscriber base:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/most-popular-youtubers-with-...
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| It's worth noting that platforms tend to have a gender(sex?
| sorry I'm bad with the terminology), bias that skews
| male/female. I seem to recall hearing that Youtube skews male
| (in viewership) and IG female. (if someone has links to
| stats, thanks in advance)
|
| I wonder if this is at play with these two cases?
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Now do Instagram and Tiktok
| sam1r wrote:
| Tikthot
| Fricken wrote:
| I follow a lot of rock climbing on insta, and the top men
| definitely have more followers than the top women, but if
| it's a pic of an average climber on an average climb, it'll
| get way more likes if the climber is a woman.
|
| In the old world of professional climbing, when the magazines
| decided who was worthy of attention and accolades,
| sponsorships were generally handed out according to merit.
|
| Now days, sponsorship is shifting more and more to climbers
| who are media friendly and good at drawing attention to
| themselves. Top tier climbers are now refashioning themselves
| into mediocre youtube celebrities, with mixed results.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I think most top YouTubers are considered "creators" more
| than "influencers". It takes a substantially different set of
| skills to create videos people want to watch than photos
| people want to view, and intuitively you'd expect the latter
| to tilt more towards first-impression attractiveness.
| Instagram fits more closely with the way this guy used his
| Twitter account (pictures and text), I can't seem to find an
| authoritative list of independently-famous Instagram
| influencers, but the lists I've seen consist primarily of
| models.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Almost every guy in that list is pretty damn handsome. The
| notable exception is Luisito Comunica, who I'm guessing
| makes up for it by being exceptionally interesting.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| "Pretty handsome" is relative. Pewdiepie is a good-
| looking guy, but his analogues on Instagram are 1000x
| more so. And I can't imagine someone like Casey Neistat
| becoming remotely as big an Instagram star as he is on
| YouTube.
|
| It's also telling how male the list is.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| When people say "influencer" they're usually referring to the
| long-tail of people with 10k+++ followers who don't really
| create anything other than a curated snapshot of their life.
| They're usually on platforms like Instagram and Twitter where
| the bar to post content is very low. They make their money by
| posting sponsored content, because they have no other way of
| monetizing their audience (they have no skills except for
| building audiences).
|
| The top 26 list of YouTubers is filled with influential
| people, and many people would say that they're influencers,
| but they're not typical examples.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > (they have no skills except for building audiences).
|
| And that "skill" is based almost entirely on being
| attractive.
|
| And these days, with camera and video filters, even that's
| not necessary any more.
| undefined1 wrote:
| to dominate the top of leaderboards, whether it's Youtube or
| Starcraft, takes a single-minded obsession that is more
| common with men.
|
| Pewdiepie was obsessed with having the most subscribers. Mr.
| Beast did little else than obsess over the Youtube algorithm
| for many years on end.
| dgellow wrote:
| It's human nature to follow only young influencers? That's a
| weird claim. Sounds like we take the current situation and
| justify it afterwards by saying "that's human nature".
| pcbro141 wrote:
| Sex sells. Young attractive women attract the most sexual
| attention of any demographic (see any online dating/hookup
| site's stats, porn stats, etc).
|
| And the commenter didn't say "only". Yes, people follow non-
| sexual influencers all the time, but it's much easier to get
| followers if you're sexually attractive.
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| > It's human nature to follow only young influencers?
|
| Marketers have known this for years before the appearance of
| "influencers" - youth sells, and a young women have better
| cross-gender appeal than young men. Go ahead an open any pre-
| WWW paper magazine, count the number of women vs. men who
| appear in the adverts for non-gendered products
| coliveira wrote:
| Not a weird claim at all, you have to be very self conscious
| not to click and watch young people doing whatever. It is a
| natural tendency humans have. It has worked in any
| entertainment industry (from Hollywood to Youtube) because it
| exploits how our brains are wired.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I didn't write "only".
| shaftway wrote:
| If a majority of people do something because that's what they
| want to do, doesn't that _by definition_ make it human
| nature?
| dgellow wrote:
| That's ignoring how much control and influence the platform
| itself has. It's not a free market, the platform decides
| who trends and what matters or not.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No. A majority of people doing something in a particular
| moment doesn't mean that it is an intrinsic quality of
| people. Otherwise we'll start to say that Coca-Cola and The
| Simpsons are genetic destiny.
|
| There have been plenty of times during history during which
| nobody cared what young people thought. I'd venture to say
| the majority of it.
| andresp wrote:
| Nobody cares about what young people think now either. We
| are talking about a very small subset of model-like
| stylish youngsters (mostly women). 99.99% continue to be
| ignored as usual.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No, it makes it a _kind_ of human nature. People are not
| homogenous, there are distinct sub-types of personality,
| albeit not that many.
| baq wrote:
| He has a point and has found a solution.
|
| Want to influence people? Use faceapp to change yourself into a
| face people feel good seeing (pretty girl strikes the correct
| neurons in majority of viewers). In the best case limit
| everybody does this and hopefully it stops being effective.
| Worst case every influencing person does this anyway?
| technofiend wrote:
| He's rediscovered the second meaning of MMORPG: Millions of
| Men Role Playing Girls. People have been representing
| themselves online as female to gain some advantage for a very
| long time.
| andresp wrote:
| That might contribute to a diversity of perspectives but I
| wonder what would be the consequences for society when
| everyone needs to reconcile their online appearance with
| their real world appearance.
| munk-a wrote:
| Can we clarify what a real world appearance is here? Does
| your real world appearance involving nice looking clothes,
| makeup or having showered recently?
|
| Why do we even really care about real world appearance,
| appearance is something that we have very little control
| over and if we've accidentally created something in the
| internet that allows folks to escape their appearance can't
| we just celebrate it?
|
| We seem to be accepting that gender identification and body
| dysmorphia are both real things that people deal with and
| this meta-society where you can look however you please is
| probably a really helpful outlet for those who don't like
| how people judge their appearance from day-to-day - I think
| it's important that we preserve this freedom and try and
| ascend beyond judging people by their meat-bags.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Many do so openly but with animated avatars that duplicate
| their facial expressions by way of facial motion capture.
|
| They effectively play an animated character live and voice it
| as they perform it's facial expressions.
|
| On the subject of Japanese gender changes, a most interesting
| one is played by a Japanese female artist who plays a male
| character that looks like a female once again. -- this artist
| has a particular habit of creating male characters that look
| as though they be female.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRkO-V29fFw&ab_channel=Spiri.
| ..
| rfreiberger wrote:
| I'm just here for the two stroke that we never got in the states.
| :(
| decafninja wrote:
| Male or female, if you're very good looking, you probably could
| achieve some degree of success as a social media "influencer"
| these days. As people have said, thus is human nature since
| forever.
|
| With the rise of digital avatars that are testing the limits of
| photorealism, I'm wondering if your actual physical appearance
| starts to become less of a limiting factor for things like this
| though.
|
| Heck, there is now an entire K-pop idol girl group launching
| composed entirely of digital characters. While not 100% perfect,
| I'm shocked at how realistic they look and act:
|
| https://www.koreaboo.com/news/ai-kpop-girl-group-deep-real-a...
| wccrawford wrote:
| I'm not buying it. Notice that the girl's hair covers her ear in
| different ways each time, so it can't be her hair and ear, it has
| to be his.
|
| But her hair doesn't actually match his hair. So that's not it,
| either.
|
| These shows are all about shock, and I wouldn't be surprised if
| they were fooled as well.
| dorkwood wrote:
| Maybe the "reflection" they used to catch him was the fake, and
| all the others are real.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The faceapp thing does hair as well though. It's probably less
| jarring if it has 'close' hair to work with to begin with.
| feintruled wrote:
| I wonder too - last time I tried faceapp it did a very
| convincing gender swap on me, but the face changed
| significantly with every photo I took - depending on angle,
| lighting, who knows? I began to suspect to wasn't making 'me'
| into a woman at all, just superimposing a female face that fit.
| (One of the best transforms actually looked like my wife, which
| was a moment for Freudian reflection).
|
| Anyway, unless faceapp has improved a lot, I'm sceptical this
| guy was always able to show as the same 'person'.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| That is a fun take on "projection." :-) I expect to see a lot
| more of this with the wide availability of GAN driven image
| networks that can change faces/voices etc. Its like autotune for
| looks. Given how he was found I expect a software update that
| removes an person image in a mirror making them effectively
| vampires :-).
|
| For the youngsters in the crowd, we used to have these phone
| numbers you could call where you could be connected with a "sexy
| woman who would talk to you and fantasize with you." Guess what,
| the only requirement for the job was "sexy voice" _not_ actually
| being all that sexy. Poor chaps paying $1 /minute to have phone
| sex with 45 - 50 year old women who not only have sexy voices but
| know a thing or two about sex.
|
| "Influencers" are, as a money making entity, in the same genus as
| phone sex, product salespeople, and actors. They are there to
| create an attractive illusion that increases sales/market
| activity around an attached product.
| the-dude wrote:
| Is there an English equivalent to the Dutch saying _you need to
| learn on an old bike_ ?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| A) that is hilarious, and B) not that I have heard.
| fudged71 wrote:
| Wow leave the guy alone. Is this any different from 'exposing' a
| cross dresser etc?
| jeffnv wrote:
| He's got great hair.
| tpmx wrote:
| Perhaps he's been using Christopher Walken's technique of
| pulling on your own hair for five minutes every morning to
| encourage blood circulation in your scalp? :)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czK6ReYbaTk (Conan, 1m43s)
| goldcd wrote:
| Not very hackery - but that was my prominent thought at the end
| of the article.
|
| I mean maybe there is a tech point, that hair has historically
| been a pretty hard thing to model, so I'd presume hard to
| correct with a filter - so maybe its his luscious locks that
| helped sell the ruse (and I'll need to wait another few years
| to have my hairline pseudo-restored)
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| FaceApp also has a hair filter. You can change the color,
| make it curly, longer, etc.
|
| In fact, it's popular in the transgender community. People
| can experiment with their new gender identity with a few
| clicks. You can transform a bald masculine figure into a soft
| model with long hair that retains some of your bone structure
| (and vice versa). Here is a tweet of one such transformation
| done on an actor using a stack of FaceApp filters:
| https://twitter.com/KaiqueBanks/status/1276185681660968961
|
| Here's the ad for the hairs feature:
| https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=600497397462983 (Apologies
| for linking to Facebook, it seems that they only advertise
| features there.)
| aspaviento wrote:
| I've seen also very realistic wigs in a Japanese video so it
| could be fake too.
| [deleted]
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| The rise of normies on the internet has shown that they have
| forgotten the cardinal rule of the internet. No one is who they
| say they are.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I'm hoping it ends up the 50yo is also a fake ...
|
| I'm not saying I wouldn't be fooled, but the female face looks
| too smooth to me, not in a make-up way but in a post-processed
| separately to the rest of the image way (doesn't appear to have
| the noise that the rest of the image does?).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That's how most of Snapchat/Instagram and other selfies look to
| me. I assume whatever app people are using are all creating
| "fake" pictures smoothing their skin and whatnot.
| dorkwood wrote:
| A lot of phones now come with this feature in the default
| camera app. I had a family member uploading group photos that
| all had smoothing applied to our skin. They said it made us
| look better. I found it offensive.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Especially since it just makes you look "worse" by
| comparison in real life. I've actually had this happen to
| me: meeting a friend I've only seen online for the better
| part of 10 years. My brain stalled upon seeing them because
| I knew who they were, but they just look so much worse than
| their pictures.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Nobody's surprised by that anymore though; skin care and makeup
| hides a lot of sin, and photo filters are commonplace.
| /r/instagramreality has a LOT of that.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Lots of people post-process their photos, especially female
| influencers who use their beauty to attract subscribers.
| wruza wrote:
| Can't say that thread is missing the point, but he doesn't look
| like a young girl, because what you see is not a young girl
| either. It is a simulation of what a young girl would look like
| if she applied a ton of made up makeup (hence the word) to look
| attractive.
|
| If you're asking yourself why females tend to have more followers
| than males, and males get more followers when disguised as a
| female, remember that the "attractive" part is neither female nor
| male, not even human. It is our notion of perfect attractiveness
| that is completely made up and females exploited that since
| forever because sexual behavior asymmetry (women attract, men
| approach).
|
| In a world without makeup, uv filters, clothes and odor
| deception, almost everyone is a red uncle biker.
| eplanit wrote:
| There should be a Catfishing award created and given to this guy.
| His motives were really very innocent, which adds to the beauty
| of the ruse.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| It is catfishing if it's not done to get something out of a
| specific victim?
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| In this case it's attention.
| dheera wrote:
| If he actually catfished I don't support it, but I feel
| like if he was doing it only for attention it's not such a
| bad thing.
|
| After all yes if you're an old guy people will discriminate
| against you in who they follow, and among other things, he
| just exposed that fact for the world to realize.
| boublepop wrote:
| If using a filter to improve your looks to gain attention
| is categorized as catfishing, then suddenly every single
| celebrity and model is in that category.
|
| The guy changed his looks using a filter, it's nothing that
| haven't been done to death by the kardashians. The novel
| element here is just the sharp contrast between his before
| and after personas.
| anotheryou wrote:
| A great freedom :). Reminds me of harroway's cyborg manifesto.
| It's not an exact match, but interesting to read along this
| phenomenon:
|
| > Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in
| which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.
| This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful
| infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist
| speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the
| supersavers of the new right. It means both building and
| destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space
| stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would
| rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
|
| He of course chose the goddess, but still breaks the gender
| dualism and got rid of his age.
| davesque wrote:
| There's an interesting train of thought that could follow from
| this. I've been trying to figure out what could eventually enable
| people to realize that most of what they see on the internet is
| entirely made up (or could be). Perhaps nothing would make this
| more clear than considering that literally any face or persona
| you see on social media could be entirely fictional. For example,
| in light of this Japanese biker uncle story, how could you ever
| really feel confident about dating online? And if you didn't,
| what's the alternative? Well, if you still trust your own eyes,
| there's always the physical world.
| analog31 wrote:
| Great idea for an A/B test.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| At that point you'd be better served using generated humans
| https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/digital-humans
| IncRnd wrote:
| I approach the Internet as - you are all digital humans.
| You've passed, but not all digital humans have passed the
| Turing Test.
| goldcd wrote:
| Why just A/B?
|
| Could generate trees of filters applied to your content, with a
| separate channel output on each leaf.
|
| Breed the filters that work, kill off the ones that don't get
| the clicks. SEO for your appearance.
| 01100011 wrote:
| This is awesome. Just imagine how many radio stars wouldn't have
| been killed by video if this were around in the 80s.
|
| Seriously, the world is full of talented performers, but they
| lack the look or image that the entertainment industry demands. I
| look forward to seeing how this progresses.
| yosito wrote:
| The only Instagram influencers I follow are people I know in real
| life. So I know that the people are real. But even then, the
| content they post is often framed in an unrealistic way and
| sometimes outright fake or edited. I know this because I've
| traveled with them, and seen the real side of all of the same
| things that they post about.
|
| I can understand why people find Instagram influencers
| entertaining, especially the ones that appear to be attractive
| women. It's obviously entertaining enough that it's a realistic
| career option for many attractive women. But to me, believing
| that what you see on Instagram is real life is like someone in
| the 90s believing that tabloid newspapers at grocery store
| checkout aisles were real life. We should all know better.
| wayanon wrote:
| I hope there's a young female Japanese biker using a 50-year-old
| man's face on their instagram posts.
| [deleted]
| RocketOne wrote:
| So, essentially he catfished 16,000 followers.
| berniemadoff69 wrote:
| loud auto-playing audio as soon as you open the site
| rantwasp wrote:
| i am not even mad. this is amazing. now i'm gonna follow the
| dude. deal with it :))
| bahmboo wrote:
| 50? Sure bro :) another level of fun.
| keenreed wrote:
| This is just plain transphobia.
|
| Person used filters and makeup to make themselfs look better and
| younger. This never ever happened before! OMG, call the
| police!!!!!
| jessa0 wrote:
| Exactly. How is this any different than any Instagram filter
| that many influencers of any gender use to make themselves look
| younger?
|
| I think this was only a news story in Japan because feminism /
| LGBTQ rights in Japan have a long way to go before people feel
| comfortable being themselves in public.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| How is this transphobia?
| keenreed wrote:
| Because it does not make HN frontpage when "normal" woman
| uses Instagram filters.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Genuine attempt to answer: It's seen as humorous or weird
| that a man would want to appear to be a young woman. It's
| unclear in this case whether the person being photographed is
| trans.
|
| This article is not a tech demo or deep dive, it's gawking at
| a man "pretending" to be a woman. It reinforces the idea that
| trans women are just men "pretending" to be women.
|
| It's not too many steps removed from something like Ace
| Ventura, which went out of its way to explicitly frame trans
| women as "gross". Yes, over time media has gotten a little
| less explicit about this, but there's definitely a long tail
| of media that's like, "Look at this weird trans/trans-
| adjacent person over here..."
| keenreed wrote:
| I already made an answer, but it got flagged. Problem is
| the double standard.
|
| If 50 year old woman presents herself younger, it is not
| big deal. We see it every day in celebrity magazines.
|
| So this person presenting themselves under different
| gender, is the only reason people talk about it.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| Are you serious? This man used an app to digitally
| transform his face into someone entirely different.
| Equating the reaction to this as trans-phobia is probably
| the single dumbest thing I've read on HN. If I use a filter
| to make myself look like a dog, am I offending people who
| identify as dogs? The lengths certain people go to whine
| and cry victim about everything is really sad.
| marknutter wrote:
| I think the number of people out there who see this and
| relate it to trans people is vanishingly small.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Is that due to education? Lack of understanding of the
| trans experience? Given that the number of trans people
| out there is already fairly small (single digit
| percentages), I wouldn't expect trans awareness to be
| wide. Especially internationally.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Well I'm never going to understand any mental state that
| I don't explicitly live in. I don't understand why
| someone flips their lid and murders someone, and no
| amount of education changes that.
|
| I don't understand how someone who wins the lottery
| feels, and no amount of education will change that
| either.
|
| At some point we need to realize that it's not someone
| else's job to validate whatever feelings and internal
| shit that we got going on in our heads. At the end of the
| day, it's not anyone else's job to "identify" with your
| preferences, and if someone thinks that your sexual
| preferences are gross, that's actually OKAY.
|
| I think many people assume that everyone needs to be okay
| with everyone else's preferences, but not only is that
| totally unrealistic, but what does it accomplish? You're
| not going to rid malice and evil from the world by
| accepting everyone's preferences, so what are we trying
| to solve by "educating" everyone about transgenderism?
| keenreed wrote:
| Yes, it is tiny tiny minority, and we can safely ignore
| them...
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Umm.. Excuse my ignorance--but--my understanding was that a
| trans woman IS just a man pretending to be a woman?
| Pfhreak wrote:
| English may not be your first language? I think you have
| perhaps unintentionally said something _extremely_
| offensive.
|
| Trans women are women. Trans women were born men, but
| they are not pretending.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Maybe it's the power of suggestion, but the photos looked
| instantly fake to me.
|
| In any case, it seems fair that a person represent their online
| image any way they like. Who's to say how this man 'identifies'?
| He does.
| danShumway wrote:
| Agreed, I just don't see the problem here.
|
| Even from the perspective of, "he's just doing this to get more
| clicks," who cares? I just don't see how it's a problem for him
| to present himself however he wants to present himself.
|
| At some point for some people "digital avatar" became a dirty
| word, and I don't understand it. I don't think he owes anyone
| online his real-world face. He doesn't owe them some kind of
| disclaimer either. If people online are following him because
| they think they have some kind of parasocial relationship to a
| girl, that's a personal issue they should think about on their
| end. And in any case, everyone online already has a persona
| they project; I have a persona and a set of characteristics and
| attitudes I project when I post on HN even though I don't hide
| my real name or identity. Knowing me on HN is not the same
| thing as knowing me in real life; if I'm allowed to do that,
| why can't he?
|
| So he extends that to his face. Maybe he(she) is a woman but
| hasn't chosen to let people know yet. Maybe he's genderfluid in
| different places. Or maybe he just wants to have a woman avatar
| on social accounts for whatever reason. None of that is a
| problem.
|
| This is fine even though he seems to identify as a man outside
| of the Internet; he doesn't have to identify as a woman to do
| this. Unless he's running around doing something genuinely
| harmful or trying to troll women, then let him choose how he
| presents himself online regardless of whether or not it matches
| his normal day-to-day gender identity.
|
| "Getting more clicks on Instagram" isn't a horrible crime or
| deception that we should be concerned about.
| keenreed wrote:
| Nobody cares about the fact pictures are fake. 90% of instagram
| pictures are fake.
|
| The only problem is he/she is not "real" woman. This person is
| clearly presenting themselves under different gender, and here
| is large number of people harassing them/her/him.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| There are some face-adjusting filters that make people
| "prettier" on both instagram and snapchat that immediately make
| them look like recognizable-looking aliens to me, but they're
| common enough that I could see people missing that it's
| actually a more extreme change in this case.
| rchaud wrote:
| If you're on IG and TikTok regularly, it might be harder to
| tell. Pretty much everybody is using filters. Even heavy
| filters that basically change how you look aren't a breach of
| etiquette, since it's all 'just for fun'.
| mkl95 wrote:
| This goes to show how dangerous deep fakes can be when people
| are willing to believe. Several people had called him out
| already, and they had provided evidence, but thousands of
| people still believed he was a young woman.
| danShumway wrote:
| It's only "dangerous" if being a young woman is somehow an
| intrinsically important transactional part of following the
| account -- if the followers feel like they're being defrauded
| or something.
|
| But honestly, the people who have that association or who
| view following an account as some kind of relationship should
| be taking a look inward about why the physical
| characteristics of a biker are so important to them in the
| first place. I don't feel a huge need to make it easier for
| people to do something that I feel like they shouldn't be
| doing in the first place.
|
| Down that road lies the segment of the Internet that gets mad
| when they find out a woman streamer is married because "she
| should have been upfront about it." And I just don't want to
| touch that part of the Internet with a 10 foot pole. I'm not
| worried about their ability to form unhealthy, one-sided
| relationships with people they've never met.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| So? That's the point. He is what he represents himself to be.
| Not what we want him to be.
| mkl95 wrote:
| > The man reportedly said that nobody wants to see an
| "uncle", and so, he turned himself into a "beautiful woman"
| so that his photos would be popular.
|
| He self identifies as a 50 year old man. He admits that he
| just did it for attention near the end of the article.
| luckylion wrote:
| So? He wanted to make a point, or he wanted attention,
| what did anyone lose by him pretending to be a young
| woman and get attention?
|
| Instagram biker chicks might be annoyed because he's a
| competitor, but anyone else?
| LanceH wrote:
| I assume all the instagram biker chicks are no turning
| off their filters and removing makeup, right?
| soperj wrote:
| He self identifies as a 50 year old man who identifies as
| a young beautiful woman, not just as a 50 year old man.
| jessa0 wrote:
| I'm not going to assume anything about this person's
| gender, but I think it's worth mentioning that the
| Japanese government uses violence to erase transgender
| existence [1], so it may not be a safe place to be non-
| cisgender.
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/9ef16f52e9b94b9a838b17a63c
| 6c1e8d
| mkl95 wrote:
| Unfortunately, there are quite a few things Japan has
| tried to erase through history, with varying degrees of
| success. "Silence" is a pretty good novel that touches on
| one of those things (beware of descriptions of torture /
| extreme violence).
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Why does anyone care
| ktm5j wrote:
| Agreed. And honestly as a trans woman I hate seeing this kind
| of thing. The only reason people are paying attention to this
| is that society has turned the idea of men (ie assigned male at
| birth) identifying or representing themselves as women into a
| joke. The amount of random strangers who laugh at me on a daily
| basis is absolutely disheartening, it's really an awful thing
| to have to deal with (same with being threatened, assaulted,
| denied service which I have no legal protection against, not
| being able to use public restrooms)...
|
| If you're interested Netflix has a wonderful documentary called
| Disclosure [0] about the media's portrayal of trans people,
| women in particular. I highly recommend!
|
| 0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8637504/
| marknutter wrote:
| Wouldn't stuff like this make it less likely for people to be
| shocked by gender nonconforming folks?
| danShumway wrote:
| I don't really buy that these stories help. The article
| plays this off as a surprising, weird event that people
| should be surprised by.
|
| And while I'm assuming the person in question identifies as
| a man based on what he says, he(she) might not, and might
| just be in the closet saying the right things because he
| knows the environment he lives in. If that's the case, the
| article might even be harmful since it reinforces that this
| is a persona and never even touches on the idea that it
| might be a representation of his(her) actual gender
| identity.
|
| But in either case, the big thing to me is that the article
| is harmful because it makes it everyone else's business. It
| creates this world where people are expected to validate
| that avatars online match physical bodies. Another way of
| looking at the question of whether or not this person is in
| the closet is that none of us know this person in real
| life, and it's kind of messed up that we're jumping behind
| the veil he put up so that we can validate whether or not
| he's transgender or nonbinary or what.
|
| He doesn't owe us any of that. He doesn't owe us coming out
| of the closet, or staying in the closet, or explaining
| whether or not there is a closet, or justifying what he's
| doing. Even in the real world when we see nonbinary people,
| we're not owed some kind of explanation of their entire
| world; not unless that's something they want to share. So
| the article turns something that should be a personal
| decision into a curiosity that needs to be explained, to
| the point where the media actually tracked this person down
| for comment rather than just leaving him alone.
|
| An article that talked to someone like this and
| (consensually) explored his motivations on his terms might
| be normalizing, but to me this comes off as the opposite --
| it comes off as reinforcing that people should be shocked
| by gender fluidity.
| ktm5j wrote:
| There's nothing in this article that talks about gender non
| conforming people an the issues that affect us.. unless I'm
| missing something. People who aren't already educated are
| just going to have a laugh and leave with the same
| preconceived notions that they came in with. This person is
| being portrayed as someone who is misrepresenting
| themselves, not someone who identifies as female, and in
| fact that's what he says he's doing.
| gowld wrote:
| Everyone big on instagram is fake. But people assume it's large
| asymmetric women faking, not men.
| mosselman wrote:
| The discussion here is a lot about 'deep fakes' and where will we
| be if we can't distinguish fake from real, but this is so
| obviously fake that I fear we might not care at all.
|
| Even if it were a real young woman, why would anyone look at
| those obviously fake images? It is like someone from the 90s used
| paint to paste a random image on some random biker's head.
|
| Also, why go through the trouble of having that hair and a real
| bike to begin with if the audience's sense for what is real is so
| low? You might as well take random images of empty parking lots
| and copy paste random bikes with random bodies and a young
| Japanese woman's face on them and it would look the same or
| better.
| soared wrote:
| They look convincing enough to me. And if I saw one while
| scrolling Instagram, where I see ~3 images a second I
| definitely wouldn't notice.
| gcheong wrote:
| My cynical take on this is that eventually ageism in tech won't
| be a thing with the combination of wfh and everyone being a young
| 20 something tech person online.
| zabardasth wrote:
| Why not pseudoanonymous / anonymous identities that work
| together on a decentralized platform like Urbit? The
| corporation is obsolete. DAOs will be the future.
| [deleted]
| cambalache wrote:
| There is a closing window of opportunity to make bank creating
| machine-learning generated girls and a farm of onlyfans accounts.
| Plenty of young (and not-so-young) men are paying to simulate
| even the slightest semblance of a relationship with a member of
| the opposite sex. In 10 years or so when distinguishing fake from
| real will be almost impossible expect the value of those accounts
| to plummet and a return to more ancient forms of transacting
| beauty and sex for money.
| puchatek wrote:
| This meaning of "uncle" should make it into mainstream english.
| dinglefairy wrote:
| I'd hit it
| bitwize wrote:
| Ah, Japan, where even middle-aged men want to be cute girls. I'm
| reminded of a few years ago when a popular "female" Vtuber let
| his motion capture software slip and accidentally revealed his
| face as that of a middle-aged otaku. Since then I guess there's
| been an acceptance of kayfabe among Vtuber stans.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Hololive seemed to have completely bypassed the problem by
| creating completely fictional characters voiced by... someone.
| parliament32 wrote:
| It's worth noting that crypto-signed images have been around for
| a long time, just in specific professional cameras:
| https://www.dpreview.com/articles/3146736527/canondvke2
|
| I imagine, as this sort of thing becomes more common, we'll see
| image "verification"/signing being a feature on all cameras, and
| eventually extend to mobile phone cameras for photos/videos as
| well.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| And once it has been shared, screen-shotted, re-shared,
| compressed, phone taking a picture of it on a monitor etc
|
| Sure, if you want to use it to try and prove you did
| take/create an image of something, but it doesn't help prove
| you /didn't/
| yosito wrote:
| I think there would be some potential for an photo-based
| journalism platform that only publishes crypto-signed geo-
| tagged photos. It seems that stock photos, and even fake photos
| are the norm on mainstream news sites these days. It's very
| hard to get verified photographic evidence of news stories.
| CharlesW wrote:
| That's cool, but it seems like building a trusted chain of
| custody from source/capture, to editing (where lots of assets
| will be combined/composited together), to distribution will be
| tricky.
|
| Plus, how does one guarantee that light hitting the camera
| sensor hasn't already been manipulated?
| de6u99er wrote:
| IMO this would just help someone prove that a certain original
| image was made with a specific camera in regards of IP and to
| protect themselves at court against claims of having tampered
| with an image.
|
| What we see on the web are mostly resized and heavily
| compressed images. Not sure how such a cryptographic signature
| could work in such cases.
| cwkoss wrote:
| It seems like his motivation was primarily increased online
| engagement.
|
| As human socialization occurs increasingly in digital spaces,
| will be interesting to see if there is a rise in trans people who
| only wish to transition using technology without wanting to
| change their own analog physical appearance.
|
| Similarly, I wonder if there are remote workers who use filters
| like these to consistently present an idealized version of
| themselves professionally.
|
| I predict within the next 20 years, having an avatar that is more
| attractive than your true physical form will become normalized.
| Perhaps some middle aged people will only present as their 20
| year old selves online. I'm sure transracial avatars will be a
| controversial issue.
|
| Maybe I should short cosmetics and go long on GPU manufacturing.
| tommoor wrote:
| > Perhaps some middle aged people will only present as their 20
| year old selves online.
|
| Oh, this for sure is already happening. A lot of people's
| profile pictures (for example on twitter) are frozen in time
| some 10 years ago.
| nomdep wrote:
| At some point soon(ish), deep fakes like this are going to end
| the porn industry, including Only Fans, in its current form.
|
| Is going to be replaced at by computer-rendered photos/videos,
| some voice actors and a group of interns answering the chat.
| SamBam wrote:
| What really worries me about the DeepFakes stuff is not so much
| the fakes -- I'm worried about that, but that's been written
| about to death -- but that now it adds plausible deniability to
| _anyone_ caught on camera doing anything.
|
| If we had video footage of, say, a politician doing something
| clearly illegal on camera, then it's simply the word of the
| politician against the word of the source -- the latter of whom
| may need to remain anonymous.
|
| That said... the other way around is still the more dangerous, I
| guess. If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of
| the US president doing/saying something really heinous, that has
| the potential to inflame the world long before the truth can get
| its boots on.
| keiferski wrote:
| Personally I think this might be a good thing. The alternative
| is a squeaky clean politician that has no character, mistakes,
| or experiences.
|
| > I guess. If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking
| video of the US president doing/saying something really
| heinous, that has the potential to inflame the world long
| before the truth can get its boots on.
|
| By the time this becomes possible, it will be widespread
| knowledge that deepfakes exist.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| Even with widespread knowledge that deepfakes exists, you can
| still make credible videos of people that damages them.
|
| For example, picture a video of Trump saying in private
| committee 'I want to fuck that nigress'. That would be
| extremely heinous, and probably be a fake, but can you be
| 100% sure from a president that also said 'grab them by the
| pussy' ?
|
| The line between real and fake news is becoming more and more
| tenuous.
| [deleted]
| SamBam wrote:
| It's already possible. Look at the Tom Cruise deepfakes. It
| just requires the power to get a great actor of similar
| build, and lots of processing power, both of which are within
| the reach of a state, easily.
|
| And I don't think knowing the deepfakes exists will convince
| everyone. Plenty of fake photos already get passed around on
| Facebook and what-not, even though Photoshop has existed for
| decades.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| > it adds plausible deniability to anyone caught on camera
| doing anything.
|
| I see this concern brought up frequently but I don't really
| think this is a big deal. In the grand scheme of things,
| ubiquous availability of video cameras is a fairly new
| development. Video cameras themself are a fairly new
| development.
|
| We had a functional society before video evidence and we will
| have a functional society after video evidence.
|
| There was a very short window of time in which we had somewhat
| reliable video evidence but it is now coming to an end and we
| will manage.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Functional? perhaps, but I would say that if one peer into
| history, what one finds is suspects convicted on evidence
| that would seem flimsy by today's standard, and so will the
| future look at us.
|
| I would think that the number of false positive convictions
| declines with the advancement of new technology, and that
| this is perhaps a temporary setback.
|
| There was a time before fingerprints and d.n.a. evidence as
| well, both of which have been very helpful not only in
| convicting the guilty, but in exonerating the innocent, and
| if ever come the time that it be feasible and affordable for
| a layman to plant fake d.n.a. evidence and fingerprints, that
| would be quite a setback for criminal forensics.
| koboll wrote:
| I think it's even simpler -- liars attracting any degree of
| press attention won't be able to get away with it.
|
| "That picture was Photoshopped" doesn't work as a defense
| because it's not too difficult for experts to tell a
| Photoshop from a genuine image, nor to interview someone at
| the scene of an alleged event and learn the truth.
|
| The same will be true with deepfakes, only much more so,
| because there are so many more ways to give away that it's a
| deepfake. Video adds new dimensions of scrutiny like how well
| the fake face tracks the head, matches lighting and
| expression, etc. Deepfake detection is in its infancy but you
| can bet it'll be even more accurate than Photoshop detection.
| shpx wrote:
| Lying is not a new phenomenon. Whether or not it's useful or
| good is a philosophical question with many answers which don't
| matter because if it becomes possible we will (have to) adjust
| and there will always be some upside if you want to see it.
|
| Today, lying with video is really expensive, but if in the
| future everyone is able to do it and everyone knows that it's
| possible then we're back to he-said-she-said, which is how
| society has worked since the beginning, except the last 200-ish
| years. I can easily lie and say I saw Bill Clinton murder
| someone in 1990. Maybe in the future I'll be able to generate
| fake video evidence of it just as easily as I typed out that
| sentence. If everyone has a feel for how easy it is, then so
| what?
|
| The danger is in the transition, when lying using video is
| affordable by a select few, and not everyone knows about it.
| Then it's powerful. If you're worried about that then we need
| to develop and teach this technology as quickly as possible. We
| can also do something fun like collect a time capsule of
| important videos before this becomes easy and timestamp it in a
| verifiable way (by posting the hash to a blockchain or some
| authority for example).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Very good post. Another factor to consider is that a
| technology can be powerful when everyone does know a bit
| about it, but the perceptions of around it can be
| manipulated.
|
| To stick with your 'Bill Clinton murdered someone in 1990'
| example, if you are Alex Jones and you say that then I will
| be skeptical gien Alex Jones' serial unreliability. But if
| you deepfake yourself to resemble a (hypothetical) real
| person called Albert Johannsen who died in 1995, and
| manipulate the video to look like old VHS, then the
| authentic-seeming testimonial can be 'discovered' by someone
| clearing out an attic or storage unit, and then merely
| publicized by you-as-Alex Jones, who merely reports the claim
| of the discover (actually a collaborator of course).
|
| There is an endless variety of of applications, eg you have
| really committed a crime and video exists, but you produce a
| deepfake of yourself committing the same crime multiple
| different ways or the like, such that everyone thinks You Did
| It but nobody can agree about exactly how or to what extent
| and you escape justice due to the ambiguity (albeit with
| diminished future prospects).
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| The problem is much bigger, i can now use deep fake to present
| myself in a very relaxed way with a lot of confidedence and
| great facial expressions. Now i can deliver video presentations
| like a champ, just improve myself. Its me and not me.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Would better cameras circumvent the issue?
|
| Sure a deepfake is convincing on a low resolution compressed
| video, but what about a 4k or 8k video where lens distortion
| and fine details are everywhere? I don't have a lot of
| confidence that facial pores could be convincingly simulated.
| SamBam wrote:
| But are most secret camera recordings using high-res cameras?
|
| Let's say there was video recording of a politician in a
| hotel in Russia, to pick a random example. We would already
| expect it to be low-quality video even if it was real.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Let's say there was video recording of a politician in a
| hotel in Russia, to pick a random example. We would already
| expect it to be low-quality video even if it was real.
|
| But why? The cheap last-gen iPhone in my pocket can take 4k
| videos, almost everybody has something like it in their
| pockets. Quality is cheap and will continue spreading,
| fuzzy video that looks like it was taken on a 90s camcorder
| will itself seem suspicious.
| ma2rten wrote:
| Generating those low level feature is actually a much easier
| problem. Here is an example I found using a google image
| search for "upscaling":
|
| https://copyrightimage.com/2018/05/09/better-image-
| upscaling...
|
| This is from 2018, which is an eternity for machine learning
| research.
| colechristensen wrote:
| But those kinds of things also could reveal the fraud -
| adding a blemish where the real person doesn't have one,
| features that move around frame by frame in a video. The
| difference is things which look believable might be details
| which are trivially verifiably false - sure you can
| simulate my face and my voice, but can you accurately
| simulate every pore on my nose.
|
| Here's a random example:
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6619284
|
| They can detect a persons pulse from tiny variations in
| head movement, I'd like to see a deepfake simulate that!
| And it's not about this one thing, I'm sure you could
| design against these tiny measurements one by one... the
| key is that there are a _lot_ of them and a deepfake is
| going to have to simulate an enormous amount of data in
| order to pass what will become trivial tests for realism.
| This is made a much easier weapon against deepfakes when
| you have progressively better videos.
| cwkoss wrote:
| "News" organizations already edit video to maximize emotional
| impact to viewers, often in misleading ways.
|
| I don't see this as a paradigm shift as much as a continued
| slide down the slippery slope of normalized propaganda.
| fossuser wrote:
| I used to be more worried about this, but one of the things
| Trump proved is you can have unquestionably authentic video
| evidence of lies and many people won't care.
|
| The people that care about figuring out the truth and critical
| thinking will probably still figure it out.
|
| Others will believe crazy things for stupid tribal reasons
| despite contrary evidence.
| kukx wrote:
| "If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the
| US president doing/saying something really heinous (...)" Did
| we not see enough fake stories about US presidents already? The
| DeepFakes are not really needed to falsely accuse a politician,
| or to wash away the compromising material. The media can use
| anonymous sources to claim anything bad about any public figure
| without consequences. Also, they can ignore and diminish any
| compromising material, effectively shielding the subject. It is
| all about who controls the media and subsequently the
| narrative. DeepFake may or may not be used in court though.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _If we had video footage of, say, a politician doing something
| clearly illegal on camera, then it 's simply the word of the
| politician against the word of the source -- the latter of whom
| may need to remain anonymous._
|
| -- How often are politicians caught on camera doing illegal
| things now? I don't recall this happening very often. The bad
| behavior on camera I remember from way bad when ("Abscam") was
| an FBI entrapment scheme so you have more than just the video
| as testament.
|
| -- The most common "guilty by camera" situation in recent years
| have been cops and when a scene from an event where other facts
| are known gets filmed, you need far more than face manipulation
| to make a fake that's going to be plausible.
| not2b wrote:
| How will the adversary get the deep fake into circulation? If
| it suddenly appears on social media from some sketchy account,
| and in the meantime the White House press pool points out that
| they were with the President in a completely different place,
| it will blow up. And it would have to be technically perfect or
| it would fall apart on analysis.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Any evidence relied on in court needs a chain of custody, and
| pictures and videos are no different. It's why screenshots are
| generally inadmissible in court: anyone could have edited them.
| dheera wrote:
| The plausible deniability of camera footage always existed,
| even in the film days. There are lots of tricks to fake things
| on camera. Neural networks do make it much easier, but it's not
| new.
|
| That said though, make forging evidence a crime of the utmost
| seriousness. Also, /more/ cameras always makes deepfaking
| harder.
| simion314 wrote:
| There are old examples with photos including newspapers/TV that
| used faked images, so it not something new. If there is a big
| punishment for intentionally faking videos and presenting them
| as true similar like for official documents or impersonating
| officials then this technology would be used a lot less in the
| countries where this laws apply.
| pdpi wrote:
| Convincingly faking photos was, until recently, pretty damn
| hard.
|
| This is currently possible by just using a screenshot from a
| game and an app from the AppStore:
| https://twitter.com/nillxzero/status/1369452664979943427
| shard wrote:
| I think people's ability to detect fake photos have
| increased over the years. Consider the Cottingley Fairies
| photos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies),
| to my modern eyes, the fairies are unmistakably fake: the
| lighting is wrong, the resolution is wrong, the texture is
| wrong. However there were people who were convinced that
| these were real photos of fairies back then.
| [deleted]
| noxer wrote:
| But its not about evidence. Its about shifting public
| opinion. There is and most probably never will be a law that
| prevents people from sharing/liking/commenting or otherwise
| trigger the algorithms to spread something based on the fact
| that it is fake. Media also fakes stuff by simply not
| providing context. It need no "active" image manipulation.
| cutting and embedding it into other content works fine since
| years and apparently there is very very little that can
| legally be done against this. The fact that the original is
| out there is also rather meaningless. take for example the
| very popular "very fine people on both sides" quote, nothing
| stops you or me to listen to the full conversation. But even
| today from random people on the street who recognizes the
| quote probably 50% do not know the real context. Most
| probably because they simply dont care enough. They
| involuntary heard the quote but they will not involuntary
| hear the context, because one goes viral the other does not.
| simion314 wrote:
| I was thinking at some tabloids, sure some anonymous can
| post fake stuff but if a journalists creates the fake
| image/video or documents then there should be more
| consequences. Also I am not from US so I am not targeting a
| specific camp, when I was watching news (I stopped years
| ago_ a lot of energy was spent on discussing insinuations,
| fake stuff or trivial things. I realized that politicians
| know how to throw the media some delicious bones to keep
| them busy with whatever they want.
| noxer wrote:
| Its called "accountability", something mainstream
| journalism doesn't seem to have in most places. Its just
| a fact that biased "news" get more clicks and thus more
| money. Its hard to define when "faking" starts and where
| its is just non-neutral reporting.
| brightball wrote:
| This isn't much different than the problem we've had with
| internet for many years, from inflammatory headlines with no
| substance in the story on down.
|
| "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is
| putting on its shoes." - Mark Twain
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| >pedant alert<
|
| "...there exists a family of expressions contrasting the
| dissemination of lies and truths, and these adages have been
| evolving for more than 300 years. Jonathan Swift can properly
| be credited with the statement he wrote in 1710. Charles
| Haddon Spurgeon popularized the version he employed in a
| sermon in 1855, but he did not craft it. At this time, _there
| is no substantive support for assigning the saying to Mark
| Twain or Winston Churchill_. " [0]
|
| [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
| Nursie wrote:
| I like to look further into the past for ruminations that,
| while not as concise, explore the same territory. A passage
| from the Aeneid says -
|
| Rumour the swiftest of all evils. Speed lends her strength,
| and she winds vigour as she goes; small at first through
| fear, soon she mounts up to heaven, and walks the ground
| with head hidden in the clouds. Mother Earth, provoked to
| anger against the gods, brought her forth last, they, say
| as sister to Coeus and Enceladus, swift of foot and fleet
| of wing, a monster awful and huge, who for the many
| feathers in her body has as many watchful eyes beneath -
| wondrous to tell - as many tongues, as many sounding
| mouths, as many pricked-up ears. By night, midway between
| heaven and earth, she flies through the gloom, screeching,
| and droops not her eyes in sweet sleep; by day she sits on
| guard on high rooftop or lofty turrets, and afrights great
| cities, clinging to the false and the wrong, yet heralding
| truth.
| brippalcharrid wrote:
| It also has the potential to devalue real evidence in the form
| of existing compromising material unless people have done
| things like adding cryptographic hashes to immutable public
| records with attestations.
| ballenf wrote:
| So we'll return to how guilt or provenance were determined for
| thousands of years. We've only had "reliable" non-human
| witnesses for a few decades.
|
| And even with deep fakes, we'll still have fingerprints, DNA,
| phone and car tracking, facial ID systems in public places,
| etc.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It just pressures us to come up with ways to prove
| authenticity. Those ways definitely exist but are not common
| yet and we have courts and governments full of people with a
| poor grasp on technology. But basically it calls for chains of
| evidence that are cryptographically tamper proof. That's not a
| thing right now. But it's going to become a hard requirement
| when evidence can be fabricated, falsified, etc. It's also the
| key to countering fake news and a few other things.
|
| People accepting everything at face value is not going to stay
| a thing when world+dog is going to abuse their new powers. Only
| fools would believe what they see after they've been fooled a
| few times and suffered the consequences.
|
| Short term it's going to be a mess, but long term it's a good
| thing for us to figure this out and move on.
| osmarks wrote:
| I don't see how you can cryptographically validate much more
| than "this was validated by this source before this time",
| which doesn't seem to solve the problem stated by the parent
| at all.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| If you have cameras that sign their video feed with some
| id; editing software where an editor signs off on any
| edits, peopling handling/validating the content adding
| their signatures, etc. you build a chain of digitally
| signed content based evidence that you can follow all the
| way back to the original recording.
|
| Then you can get people into court testifying whether they
| used a given piece of equipment to film something, edit
| something, etc. and you can guarantee that you are watching
| the exact output of that chain of recordings, edits, etc.
|
| As I said, not a thing right now. But also not that
| technically hard to build. Right now we're just trusting
| witnesses that might be lying through their teeth without
| us knowing or being able to prove otherwise. Once we had
| such capability; anything else would be inadmissible in a
| court and no self respecting journalist would touch
| equipment without this capability. Why would they?
|
| A deep fake would look plausible but lack this chain of
| evidence.
| osmarks wrote:
| This doesn't seem significantly better than just having
| the organization providing a video sign it as
| "authentically theirs", in cases where that's possible;
| if you mean some sort of thing where editing software and
| cameras will sign things as "not tampered with", then
| this is effectively a DRM system and subject to the
| excitingly wide range of issues affecting that. This
| would not work for many situations, particularly the ones
| SamBam describes (not least due to the anonymity thing),
| as it is unlikely that there will conveniently be someone
| there with chain-of-trust-capable recording equipment and
| software.
| AdamN wrote:
| It's turtles all the way down :-)
| osmarks wrote:
| Maybe you could have some DRMish thing where the camera
| signs it with a "secret" key, but this would be terrible
| for various reasons and also likely broken very fast.
| pxue wrote:
| I don't think so. You can cryptographically sign anything
| much like how SSL works now. You'll have to rely on
| certificate authorities to assign these certs, but it
| works.
|
| Videos should be cryptographically signed, and verified
| once online. You can spoof certs but you can't really
| fake the cert authority
| osmarks wrote:
| That's what I meant by "validated by this source". But
| unlike with CAs, where they're (meant to) just base
| issuance on the simple objectively testable criterion of
| whether you control the domain in question, an external
| authority cannot easily know whether a video represents
| real events, whatever that means.
| kube-system wrote:
| But, signing some data with a certificate only indicates
| that a key belongs to a particular name. It doesn't tell
| you whether the person or organization with that name is
| trustworthy.
| [deleted]
| thinkloop wrote:
| If you authenticate the video comes from a credible
| unrelated source, that would be different than if it came
| from a mysterious unknown source. Additionally if you have
| the chain of trust, you can interrogate every step manually
| for credibility and consistency.
| osmarks wrote:
| Which is somewhat helpful, but also just pushes the
| validation work off onto large entities of some kind.
| notriddle wrote:
| Yes, of course.
|
| The value of it is that the legwork only has to be done
| once, instead of requiring everyone to independently do
| it (which would basically turn every accusation of crime
| into a DDoS against the accused).
| gostsamo wrote:
| Maybe a service or a public blockchain where you send a
| hash of a digital artefact which is signed with a time
| constrained key. The signed hash is attached to the digital
| artefact and you can check the hash on the blockchain or on
| the api's service.
|
| A blockchain is more wasteful, but a service requires a
| leap of faith in the provider.
| osmarks wrote:
| This is still just a way to validate when something
| existed, isn't it?
| simias wrote:
| This is not a technical problem IMO. You can't
| cryptographically sign reality. There's always the analog
| hole[1].
|
| It's a problem of trust within society. Look at many very
| mainstream conspiracy theories these days: there's ample
| proof that it's not true, but people want to believe so
| they'll believe.
|
| You can't fix the lack of trust in society with cryptography.
|
| I just went on a constructionist website I sometimes lurk
| when I'm bored, literally the first story I find is titled
| `The Age of "Credentialism" and "Experts" is over. Every
| Single Institution works against your interests'. You can't
| fix this mindset with maths.
|
| Video is cryptographically signed? But what about the secret
| computers in the Pentagon's basement that run on Quantum CPUs
| using ancient alien technology found in the pyramids? They
| can certainly break ECC. Here, watch this Youtube video...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
| intrasight wrote:
| What is this analog hole of which you speak? Only nature
| delivers analog ;)
|
| But nature doesn't create deep fakes - though not as the
| term is being used here. I would argue that nature has been
| making deep fakes for millions of years.
|
| Anything that is created by CNN Deep Fake tech is delivered
| via computer - either using printer or with some sort of
| screen screen. Let's eliminate printers as nobody uses them
| anymore. What about screens? I smell a business
| opportunity.
| brundolf wrote:
| Seconding this. The fracture at the heart of our society is
| not rooted in unintelligence, or lack of education or
| access to facts. It's rooted in a lack of trust. The most
| rigorous science is only as good as the trust people place
| in those performing it (and the entire chain of reporting
| from there to its reception). Those links are being/have
| been broken. No amount of added rigor will fix that. I
| don't know what will.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| I'd argue it's the opposite. We've relied too much on
| trust and promises and not enough on rigor and exactness.
| Most people aren't given facts, constraints and
| limitations until it's too late, if ever. What they're
| given are viewpoints with selective evidence and glaring
| omissions. It's remained a unsolved since the beginning
| of humanity. A solution to this problem is a rigorous
| self-proving system that wouldn't need one to convince
| another of the facts.
| simias wrote:
| I don't want to live in a trustless society. What you
| describe sounds like a totalitarian dystopia to me.
|
| I want escape hatches. I want plausible deniability.
| Facts in a vacuum are useless and can be used to propel
| all sorts of narratives. Facts without framing and
| contextualization aren't worth much. You can manipulate
| easily without technically lying, just by cherry picking
| facts that suit your agenda.
|
| You need some amount of trust and solidarity if you want
| to live in a healthy society.
| edbob wrote:
| > Those links are being/have been broken. No amount of
| added rigor will fix that. I don't know what will.
|
| The institutions could start telling the truth once in a
| while. Statements like "27 police officers injured during
| largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London" (BBC)
| and "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" (CNN) with the
| city burning down in the background account for why trust
| in media is rapidly approaching zero. It makes it clear
| that the violence and devastation is just a curiosity to
| the upper-class elites that control these institutions,
| but normal people who actually have to live with
| aftermath _are not amused_.
|
| Fauci is another huge contributor. First don't wear
| masks, they can actually hurt. Then you have to wear
| masks. Now wear two or three! But earlier he was
| ridiculing people who wore multiple masks. Along with all
| the knowingly false statements about how long lockdowns
| would last. Clearly Fauci should not be allowed to speak
| in public, but unfortunately the blast radius of his
| mistakes extends beyond him to the government and media
| institutions that defend him and amplified his
| misinformation.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _with the city burning down in the background_
|
| No exaggeration there *_*
|
| I get that you're complaining about 'liberal' media
| downplaying disorderly and often dangerous events such as
| riots to suit a political agenda, but the converse is
| also true; if one relies on 'conservative' media then
| you'd think many major American cities are post-
| apocalyptic smoking holes in the ground.
| gnramires wrote:
| You can't sign reality, but people can sign statements.
|
| If you see a video at a date D1 where you say Statement1,
| and cryptographically sign it with your key K, then at a
| later date someone can verify that at least you said you've
| watched an backed your statement.
|
| In a way all of security relies on the physical safety of
| some kind of secret data. So you have the deniability of
| key compromise in any case.
|
| If everything a president states publicly is signed with
| his key Kp, then:
|
| 1) If something controversial is published _without
| signature_ , the president can say it's not standard
| procedure and a plausible forgery;
|
| 2) If the president publishes officially without a
| signature, the public can demand one so there's no later
| equivocation;
|
| 3) Anything that has been said can be verified in the
| future by checking the presidential signature.
|
| In this case, the worst case is really a compromised key
| (although key scheduling should mitigate it), but most
| forgery cases of statements (and potentially documents,
| mandates, etc.) are eliminated.
|
| In practice, it would be difficult to get your public
| figures to sign everything they say (and difficult to get
| them to accept this kind of potential auto-incrimination
| for the public good).
| cwkoss wrote:
| That doesn't work for adversarial recordings. No one will
| sign an embarrassing or damning video of themselves, and
| those are the cases where authenticity is the most
| important.
|
| Your solution is technologically cool, but I think the
| current system of "was this published by a domain
| controlled by the office of the press secretary" is
| probably accomplishing this case well enough.
| greiskul wrote:
| For adversarial recordings, I wonder if we could have a
| camera that instantly uploads a timestamp and hash of
| each video taken to a blockchain. This way, we could have
| videos that we know for a fact were recorded at the
| latest at a certain time. It would still be vulnerable
| for a fake video to be post dated, but never pre dated.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _This is not a technical problem IMO. You can 't
| cryptographically sign reality. There's always the analog
| hole_
|
| Reality has a pretty strong "hash" naturally built in. Even
| manipulated picture carries a huge amount of information
| that isn't changed or isn't changed as much as one thinks.
|
| The manipulated pictures the motorcyclist uploaded still
| would give someone a good idea where and even when they
| were taken. That doesn't matter here but if you're making a
| more detailed argument, it's harder.
|
| Just consider, "computer forensics" is a thing even though
| any single bit on the computer can be overwritten and
| "faked".
| kodah wrote:
| Your theory is basically the theory behind Minority
| Report.
| deckard1 wrote:
| I was recently watching The Brainwashing of My Dad. Rush
| Limbaugh made millions of dollars selling lies to the
| American public. At one point there is a video clip of him
| admitting that the truth of what he is saying on radio is
| irrelevant. It doesn't matter to him. He lays out the
| recipe for generating fear and uncertainty. Basically, if
| you say something loud enough and with enough confidence
| _no one_ will stand in your way. Because, as fact checkers
| know, it takes considerable time to research a bullshit
| claim. By the time the research is done and published, the
| bullshitter has moved on and told an additional 20 lies. He
| also makes a statistical argument for how his business
| works. He doesn 't need to hook every listener. But he does
| know that _enough_ people will fall for his shtick.
|
| The troubling aspect is that all of this bullshit is
| blending together. My dad watched Fox News. Now he's hooked
| on Youtube conspiracy garbage. I'd be terrified if he ever
| became a QAnon type. We're dealing with literal internet
| cults becoming a mainstream phenomenon. We're nowhere near
| equipped for the mess we, the technologists, have made. You
| have Alex Jones out there claiming that an _elementary
| school_ shooting didn 't happen. You think these guys are
| going to trust encryption? Or anything that their Youtube
| priest tells them is a "hoax"?
|
| Education would be the answer. But education is at war with
| engagement algorithms and attention spans.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| This is a technique known as the Firehose of Falsehood:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
|
| The goal is not necessarily to convince people of a
| particular claim, it's to levy so many claims and use the
| scrambling of media acting in good faith to vet those
| claims as an overloading mechanism to get regular people
| to tune out entirely.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Also known as 'flooding the zone'. Like many political
| tropes, this originates in team sports which in turn is
| an abstraction of war. It's an awful lot easier to
| understand the media landscape if you consider it as
| cultural warfare with ideas and tropes as territory,
| although this is hard to visualize in spatial terms.
|
| The answer to this (and the accompanying tribalism that
| pervades public discourse nowadays) is often said to be
| education and critical thinking, but that requires years
| of investment and often-unwelcome external discipline to
| internalize and actuate; it's a statement of what we
| would like to have instead rather than an actionable
| solution to its own absence.
|
| Friendly emotional persuasion can work better as a de-
| escalation-bridging tactic, as suggested here:
| https://dr-gleb-tsipursky.medium.com/how-to-talk-to-a-
| scienc...
|
| This is also helpful for gathering information to
| understand the dynamics and attractiveness of false
| information, even if no changing of mind can occur; think
| of it as the difference between carefully dismantling an
| unexploded munition in order to figure out how it works
| vs. a controlled explosion to minimize future risk at the
| expense of continued vulnerability.
|
| Where conflict is unavoidable or deliberately fomented
| (eg people arguing in bad faith rather than sincerely
| believing falsehoods), an overtly hostile response
| imposes a cost on the aggressor, and when consistently
| and predictably applied it effectively alters the payoff
| matrix in an adversarial game:
| https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
|
| Many people are aware of Mutual Assured Destruction as a
| kind of nuclear diplomacy, where you are deterred from
| nuking me because I've made it very clear that if you do
| I will take you down with me, leading to a heavily armed
| but uneasy peace. There are also lesser-known concepts
| like Power Transition Theory (about how wars originate
| from weaker countries challenging stronger ones) and
| nowadays scholars of international relations tend to
| adhere to Hegemonic Stability Theory (one very powerful
| country plays Teacher/cop) or World System Theory (every
| dog has its day). Developing familiarity with the broad
| concepts of interstate conflict (without going too deep
| down any intellectual rabbit hole) can be helpful in
| modeling smaller scale political conflicts, divisions in
| civil society etc.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >People accepting everything at face value is not going to
| stay a thing when world+dog is going to abuse their new
| powers. Only fools would believe what they see after they've
| been fooled a few times and suffered the consequences
|
| This seems overly optimistic, and requires people to
| themselves suffer unambiguously from the doctored evidence.
|
| On an individual level, regular discovery of police and
| prosecutorial has not led widespread reform in those areas.
| And on a larger scale, even after things like the Gulf of
| Tonkin people largely accepted claims of WMD's in Iraq.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There are people who still claim in public to believe that
| the US election was stolen.
|
| Acceptance of evidence is socially constructed. If it's
| politically convenient to go along with the beliefs of your
| faction, and you're rewarded for saying increasingly
| ludicrous things in public, then people are going to do it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Isn't this what Adobe is trying to do? [1] It was posted on
| HN a few times but never started a discussion that I saw.
| Personally, I'm scared of it although I can't put my finger
| on why.
|
| 1. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2019/11/04/content-
| authent...
| bogwog wrote:
| > But basically it calls for chains of evidence that are
| cryptographically tamper proof
|
| JusticeCoin ICO when??
| retrac wrote:
| You jest, but distributed publicly verifiable proof that a
| certain piece of information existed, and was
| cryptographically signed at a certain date and time, and
| has not since been modified, is basically the only thing
| blockchains are actually useful for. And that sounds much
| like what we need here.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Just because some opportunists did a few ICOs does not mean
| all crypto is bad. Without crypto there would be no online
| banking, or any form of digital security, secure logins,
| etc. Crypto is a useful tool. Blockchains are a tool. And
| so are digital signatures. If you combine those tools, you
| can do some useful things like creating tamper proof audit
| logs documenting where information came from all the way
| from the sensor to your eyeballs. It's just a chain of
| digital signatures.
|
| I tried hard to avoid using the word block chain in the
| original comment to avoid exactly this kind of knee jerk
| response. But yes, kind of an obvious tool to use to record
| chains of evidence in a tamper proof way. Glad you jumped
| to that conclusion as well.
|
| Contrary to the popular belief, not every block chain based
| thing has to be an investment scam. I don't think we need a
| separate coin for this; just a shared repository of truth
| and fact with full auditing. Blockchains are kind of
| designed to be that. If you know a better way, please
| provide it.
|
| And just to pre-empt it, obviously my preferred flavor of
| block chain for this would be miner free proof of stake
| rather than proof of work.
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| Deid solves this. Couple of projects are building this on
| various blockchains.
| kawera wrote:
| Related:
|
| Chinese deepfakes are going viral, and Beijing is freaking out
|
| https://www.protocol.com/china/chinese-deepfakes-regulators-...
| aeternum wrote:
| I wouldn't worry about it too much. Having so much on video in
| the first place is a pretty recent phenomenon. 30 years ago,
| politicians had a very low chance of being caught on camera at
| all.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It comes to min that I know of few politica scandals that
| were revealed by anyone caught on camera.
| ttfxxcc wrote:
| I highly recommend you watch this lecture on blackmail
| inflation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xlmhhh9HYqc
| 01100011 wrote:
| There's plenty to worry about with deepfakes. They enable what
| amounts to a man-in-the-middle attack in real life. Imagine an
| AI able to break into the conversation and maintain two
| different communication threads with each party.
|
| Imagine what happens when you present someone with the voice
| and/or image of their loved one and pitch a product, plant an
| idea, or execute fraud? What happens when an emotionally
| unstable person is harassed by the voice of their lover or even
| a deceased relative.
|
| Now imagine that you could rent some computing power and
| perform a million of those frauds in parallel. Psychological
| warfare will never be the same.
|
| When people tell me the robots are going to kill us someday, I
| always reply that they won't have to, they'll just need to
| convince us to kill ourselves.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Wait till we have real-time deep fake video and audio. That
| will twist the world, especially the remote
| work/schooling/presence one.
| 127 wrote:
| Machines that write believable stories can fabricate entire
| realities. The deepfake stuff is just a very small part of it.
| How much of the information we use to make our daily decisions
| on come from unverified sources on the internet? How many of
| the "trusted" sources are just paid PR for the rich and
| powerful?
|
| The deepfake stuff can be solved with public/private key crypto
| anyways.
| osmarks wrote:
| How do you solve deepfakes with asymmetric cryptography,
| without just trusting the person the videos purport to be of
| to say (cryptographically) whether something is real or not
| (which is not a good solution)?
| tziki wrote:
| Honestly, good for him. I don't see any reason why the whole
| influencer culture should be dominated by specific people just
| because they're lucky to have the prerequisite looks.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Reminds me of Gay Girl In Damascus:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gay_Girl_In_Damascus
|
| Fun fact, the lesbian girl who outed him also turned out to be a
| middle-aged dude.
| slibhb wrote:
| See also:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/03/kr...
| ape4 wrote:
| He actually has pretty good cheek bones
| anticristi wrote:
| I'm starting the .true TLD. Everything else on the Internet
| should be considered fantasy.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| I wonder what happens when an update changes the filter and the
| person couldn't generate the same face again.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Maybe the first casualty of AI is Instagram influencers and nude
| models.
| yabadubakta wrote:
| I think this is pretty awesome. He was able to create a real
| avatar and go out there doing something he loved and share it
| with the world pseudonymously! Identity in our increasingly
| virtual reality can take on many turns.
| [deleted]
| smadge wrote:
| NEO: Right now, we're inside a computer program?
|
| MORPHEUS: Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are
| different, the plugs in your arms and head are gone, your hair
| has changed. Your appearance now is what we call 'residual self-
| image'. It is the mental projection of your digital self.
|
| NEO: This... this isn't real?
|
| MORPHEUS: What is 'real'? How do you define 'real'? If you're
| talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can
| taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted
| by your brain. This is the world that you know.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Ignorance is bliss.
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