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Deepfakes & The Archaic Revival: A The Long Now Foundation Ignite Talk
Abstract: Modernity was largely built upon the “epistemic backstop” of recordings we can trust. What happens when we lose this privilege? As of 02020, most widely-subscribed visions of the future seem like presentist projections of a brief moment in which the West was capable of large-scale consensus on reality. Between the challenges brought to the scientific method by advances in machine learning, the inherently divisive nature of the social media platforms out of which we’ve woven early-21st Century society, the proliferation of new ontologies in order to address what author Erik Davis calls “global weirding,” and the accelerating evolutionary arms race between counterfeiters and forensics experts, “the future” may not even be a useful way to talk about what’s next…
A note on the format: Ignite Talks are five-minute lightning presentations with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. It’s a fun and challenging format, and my invitation to present one for The Long Now Foundation seemed like a perfect opportunity to distill my thinking on a complex and difficult topic: the rise of AI-assisted forgeries and their social implications.
More info on the event and the other presentations at LongNow.org. The Keynote file of my presentation, with links to all image sources, can be found on Google Drive. My talk is the last in the series, starting at 1:06:24:
01 — This is a story about the end of reality…not the end of the world, but the end of the idea of one consensus world. Diving in, let’s nod to Alan Watts, who once said there’s “No sense in clinging to the rocks that are falling with you.”
