Had an interesting experience, earlier today. Maybe it was actually more disturbing than interesting. Or maybe both...
Anyway...
In checking my social media accounts — something I make a point of doing at least once a week — I like to browse through any "new followers" to see who might have been "reached" by something I posted.
The Facts of Life
If you're male and have been in social media for any significant period of time with any significant following, you're undoubtedly familiar with "random drive-by follows" from IG models and OnlyFans models trolling for followers.
As per usual, there were a couple of those, this go around. I routinely block/delete these after a quick double check... as they are basically spam and annoying clutter... but one of these was different.
"Different," because it was not a person, it was AI pretending to be a person. Sort of. Not exactly.
Well, I'm sure the AI wasn't pretending anything, but there was a person generating this AI persona, which was quite well done.
Well, Allllrighty then...
Because I am the sort of person who "can't leave good enough alone," I had to do a little poking around, and ended up with a software engineering graduate student who was clearly using herself as the basis for this AI persona.
Don't misunderstand — I know that identity deception is virtually as old as the Internet itself, but where does it begin and end? When does entertainment become exploitation?
And so, I find myself thinking forward to the growing presence of what is being called Web 3.0, and the growing paradigm of each of us essentially becoming "our own brand."
Supposedly this will give us all this "freedom" but freedom from what? Or freedom to what?
And it begs the question of whether this is going to be a free-for-all "caveat emptor" (buyer beware) paradigm in which people are free to do whatever they want — deceptive, or otherwise — and the onus falls entirely on the user/buyer to determine "what they are looking at"... or will we develop some system/ruleset that gives us a way to establish "what's under the hood?"
Perhaps it's not important in the context of what we loosely might call "visual arts," but let's extrapolate a bit further.
Human relationships.
Now we enter an arena where it really does matter whether or not "actual content matches the picture on the box."
When AI reaches a point where it is capable of faking out a broad spectrum of people, then what? Not suggesting the AI itself is going to rip you off, but the person behind putting the AI in your way as a "fishing lure" might have less than honest intentions.
The "shadow" I see being cast here relates to the question of whether we're moving towards something that's an equalizer or actually a tool to concentrate power, money and influence even more into the hands of the most deceptive of us.
Will we be reduced to playing a perpetual game of "who can cheat who?"
Is that what we want?
Or is this merely the early manifestations that our entire species is moving towards a predominantly virtual world where the realities of physical space no longer matter? A world in which our appearance, our work, our location, our families are no longer of any concern? A world in which everyone can have "the hottest girlfriend/boyfriend on the planet" because they will never actually occupy the same physical space?
Not claiming to have any answers... just throwing it out there for general contemplation and discussion.
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Created at 2024-03-10 01:26 PST
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I have no answers either, but with the deepfakes we have already seen, I have no idea how good they will become in five or ten years...