Deep Fake
Post Truth.
If nothing is true, you can believe anything you want.
What is real? Really real. René Descartes said there was a foundation of reality. He could think, therefore he was real. That was rock solid.
Of course, we now know that rocks aren't solid, not really. They are made of atoms and electrons and protons and smaller things yet. Those particles move around and there appears to be space between each of those atomic and sub-atomic particles. And where they are at any one time is unknowable and a matter of probabilities. A rock is a useful day-to-day concept, but it isn't a thing at the quantum physics level.
I don't really know what I just wrote about rocks. I think physicists believe this about atoms and quantum physics. I read simplified summaries of what physicists think, and I take what I have read on faith.
Elon Musk wrote that the universe may be a grand illusion.
If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality. We’re most likely in a simulation.
Maybe life is but a dream, like the song says.
This revery on reality was occasioned by an email from a reader of this blog. It had a link to this video. It shows Ukrainian air defenses. It is a dangerous time to be a Russian helicopter pilot, he wrote. The video is 71 seconds long. Dangerous, indeed.
It looks real to me. I have never seen helicopters being shot at by anti-aircraft missiles, so the video seemed plausible. It turns out to have been footage from a video game. So it was real--real video game footage. It wasn't really the Ukrainian sky.
TV viewers in Russia and Ukraine watched President Zelenskyy tell Ukraine soldiers to lay down their arms. Only it wasn't Zelenskyy. It was a Russian deep fake.
Journalists wrote that the voice was a bit off and the appearance was imperfect. I look at the two images and they look the same to me. In fact, the one on the left looks a bit more "real" than the other. Shortly after the Russians published the fake video Zelenskyy went on Ukrainian TV and said the images they were seeing now were the real Zelenskyy. Keep fighting, he said.
A quick Google search of the words "deep fake" and "AOC" immediately brings one to a rich library of pornographic videos purporting to show Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in realistic close up. This is not "photoshop" where a face is pasted over the neck of someone else. In deep fake, the eyes, mouth, lips, tongue are somehow digitally transformed using data drawn from other videos of the deep fake victim. We are seeing real pixels of AOC. What is simulated is the rearrangement of the pixels depicting words and actions she didn't do.
I am sure the images of AOC are fake based on the broader context of other information I know. If AOC had really done these sex tapes, Pamela Anderson style, I would have heard. There would be news reports about invasion of privacy, and lawsuits. This would include media sources Donald Trump and Fox News relentlessly term fake. The "real" news makes errors, too, but I generally believe they try to describe a reality that stands up to verification.
Apparently most people in Russia believe what they have been told that Ukrainians had been torturing and killing Russian speakers in Ukraine and that the "military action" is a humanitarian mission. In the broader context of what they have heard, it seems plausible to them. In the context of a regular viewer of Fox News, it makes sense that Biden could not possibly have won the election, especially since Trump is so adamant he won.
If nothing is really true for sure, then people are free to believe whatever story makes them happiest. This may not be consistent with a system of self-government.