Welcome To The End of Reality: Living in a #DeepFake World
“No sense in clinging to the rocks that are falling with you.”
- Alan Watts“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesnʼt go away.”
- Philip K. Dick
According to a 2018 article in the New York Magazine, we have already crossed the point at which most YouTube traffic is from bots designed to emulate real human users. YouTubeʼs spam-screening algorithm might now be learning to identify these bots as human, and dismiss real human users as just bots. They call this “The Inversion,” a fair name given how, amidst the turbulence of our accelerating age, the game boards of civilization have been totally upended. The purge of bots from social media is just one battle in a global war now rapidly eroding the ability of both average people and institutions to stay oriented in an objective world of fact.
In 2017, Adobe demoed software that can learn and copy vocal styles so editors can write new text and speak it in another person’s voice...and Google just cut the learning time for this “voice-cloning” software down from 20 minutes to 5 seconds. Just a year ago, Nvidia showed off how far GANs (generative adversarial networks, in which AIs are pitted against each other) have come since their invention in 2014 by making thousands of convincing human portraits from scratch, morphing people’s…
