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On the 15th of October our book “Real Fake – Playing with Reality in the Age of AI, Deepfakes and the Metaverse” has been released. It is our take on synthetic media, deepfakes, fake news, conspiracy theories, memes, internet culture, Generation Z and Alpha, crypto, narrative economics, virtual humans, CGI influencers, vTubers, NFTs, DAOs, VR, Web3, the Creator Economy and the Metaverse. Real Fake is about how humans continuously manipulate reality and how new digital technology tools enable us to go one step further in this ancient game.
The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto
“What I couldn’t find was a sober, dispassionate explanation of what crypto actually is — how it works, who it’s for, what’s at stake, where the battle lines are drawn — along with answers to some of the most common questions it raises. This guide — a mega-F.A.Q., really — is an attempt to fix that. In it, I’ll explain the basic concepts as clearly as I can, doing my best to answer the questions a curious but open-minded skeptic might pose.”
GigaChad Instagram Filter
“For several years, the Manosphere has been fascinated by GigaChad, a Herculean figure who emerged from an ongoing photography project called Sleek’N’Tears, by the artist Krista Sudmalis. […] Now, you too can experience that kind of upgrade, as Instagram user @mxm.j3 has created the GigaChad filter that us beta boys sorely need.”
Who doesn’t want to look like GigaChad?
VRChat Police Officers
“There now are nearly 11,000 members on the LPD Discord. The group, which gets its name from “lolis” — the young-looking anime girl avatars members use — is the most prominent police roleplay group in VRChat. The tightly run community allows members to experience a fantasy version of police life and prides itself on being a source of chaotic good in the strange world of virtual reality.”
CHROME EXTENSION HELPS YOU SPOT FAKE PHOTOS
“A new Chrome extension from V7 Labs wants to take the guesswork out of figuring out which faces on the web are fake and which are legit, and it does it with a claimed 99.28% accuracy. It’s designed to help rid us of misleading content and fake profiles for people who simply do not exist in the real world, as V7 Labs founder Alberto Rizzoli explains in a video published to Loom.”
Read the full article at DIY Photography.
The Myth Of The First TikTok War
“The history of war is also a history of media, and popular memory associates specific wars with different media formats. […] In this way, global events with stark differences in meaning and costs of life are understood as a collection of online incidents. Wars are named after platforms, whether or not the platforms in question really determined how people thought about that war, or experienced it, or documented it, or fought it. This is sort of tasteless, but also, because we live in a time during which media formats are iterating faster and faster, a little arbitrary. If history plans to call this “the TikTok War,” it should have a compelling case for why. […] To the extent that TikTok does affect perceptions of the war, it may be more confusing than, say, YouTube or Twitter. TikTok is a remix app, in which users cut together audio and video pulled from anywhere—and during this conflict, they have already done so to create misleading content that is difficult for the average viewer to pick apart. TikTok’s potent recommendation algorithm also generates individual experiences of the war that vary widely from one user’s feed to another. While some TikTok users are seeing graphic footage of war, others are not.”
Contact
Real Fake is a weekly newsletter in which SogetiLabs’s Research Institute VINT examines the future where synthetic reality becomes part or our objective reality. We investigate the impact of new technology on people, organisations and our society. If you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us at vint@sogeti.com.
