You will soon be replicated
What if a million versions of you that never existed suddenly did?
I published a road map for 2023 (what I would be writing about for the year). This post will hit on many of my selected topics: ethics, threatcasting, disinformation & propaganda, and psychology, to start with. There is a lot of buzz (understatement) right now about artificial intelligence. Associated key terms include neural networks, deep learning, and deep fakes. Use the preceding link at your own risk. Especially if you’re ADD/ADHD diagnosed.
So. Change is coming. You know that if you were brave enough to click the deep fakes link. You can buy nudes of women who never existed on Reddit if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Maybe you just want to see your ex doing the nasty except with the body she never had, but that you secretly fantasized about. Yep, that’s possible as well.
Is doing any of the deep fake stuff good for your brain? Nope. Rather, the opposite.
Also, you might want to take down your social media stuff. If you lean paranoid or dystopian. If you’re an optimist utopian like me, never mind!
If you're one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it.
Why am I not worried? I don’t give a toot about the social media outrage brigades, and I am not worried about being framed online for a murder. I’m in tech, and I can beat any artificial reality with various techniques. Most people are not ready to find themselves replicated.
Having said that, we in the United States live in a highly toxic culture, and young females who are replicated will be very, very negatively affected. We have spawned a society that sexualizes young teens, and women, to the point of absurdity. Which is probably a factor in why (mostly) male programmers and AI researchers are busy coming up with ways to skip over the courting rituals and create fake versions of Busty Betty and Ample Angela who lived next door to them in high school.
But don’t worry too much (just yet) - the above image was generated by Substack’s version of AI. The future is coming whether we like it or not, but I cannot spot anything that I would say remotely resembles things I find “sexy” in the above image.
My best advice: keep calm and don’t post intimate information on the Internet. It will be misused. That has always been the case. Human nature demands it.
Thank you so much for evolving with me!
I’m more worried about AI taking my job at the moment, but I don’t like any of this much either. Maybe I should switch careers and become a forensic something or other. I can’t remember the term for it but there are people who investigate hard drives to find out whether you really looked at kiddie porn or someone hid it on your hard drive. With deep fakes, there should be an increased demand for people who can do that kind of thing.
I suppose that I'm in a category of one, but I feel neutral about AI. It strikes me as neither the end of times, nor the brave new world.
Perhaps I'm at my limit of confronting existential crises, or I'm more right (than not) that AI will be a useful tool for some and largely irrelevant for others, but ultimately embedded in most techologies.
I just wish that half the time, energy and resources being poured into AI were devoted to even one of the earth-shattering problems facing this country.