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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.
Creativity As An App
“Perhaps the most mind-bending implication we’re seeing from generative AI is that, contrary to the common view that creativity will be the last bastion of human ingenuity in the face of automation, it actually appears to be far easier to automate rather difficult creative tasks than to automate relatively simple programming tasks.”
BeReal And The Fantasy Of An Authentic Online Life
“Lurking beneath the surface of BeReal’s marketing is an implicit thesis about the impact of more traditional social platforms such as Instagram: they encourage dishonesty and, in so doing, degrade our social and emotional health. This may explain the righteous or even moralizing terms in which BeReal describes itself: it’s not just another social-media app but a vision for the future of social media, one that is softer, kinder, and healthier. This is a worthy notion but also a contradictory one. For as much as the company preaches authenticity, what’s actually being transmitted is merely a different kind of performance. […] The difference between BeReal and the social-media giants isn’t the former’s relationship to truth but the size and scale of its deceptions.”
AI Drew This Gorgeous Comic Series
“The Bestiary Chronicles is both a modern fable on the rise of artificial intelligence and a testament to how shockingly fast AI is evolving. […] The visuals in the trilogy – believed to be the first comics series made with AI-assisted art – are stunning. They’re also stunningly precise, as if they’ve come straight from the hand of a seasoned digital artist with a very specific story and style in mind.”
Wow. This blew my mind. By using Midjourney the perfect comic (download here) has been created. What if somebody uploaded a model of the fictional character Storm and created it’s own story?
The Metaverse Is Not Dead – It’s Inevitable
“Why is the metaverse inevitable? It’s in our DNA. The human organism evolved to understand our world through first-person experiences in spatial environments. It’s how we interact and explore. It’s how we store memories and build mental models. It’s how we generate wisdom and develop intuition. In other words, the metaverse is about using our natural human abilities for perception, interaction and exploration when we engage the creative power and flexibility of digital content. It will happen. The only question is: Will it happen soon, or will the industry fall back into another long dark winter?”
Baby Boomers Can’t Stop Staring At Their Phones
“Too much screen time is something we usually associate with children. […] But there is another demographic that is struggling with putting down their devices: Baby boomers. Smartphones came into their lives late, but they were quickly won over. Now some of their children say they are hooked, staring at their screens constantly, even when they should be paying attention to their own grandchildren.”
Can You Tell Whether This Headline Was Written By An AI?
“AI content services are thriving. They make content creators more productive, but they also are able to produce content that no one can tell was made by a machine. This is also often true of AI-generated content of other kinds, including images, video, audio, and synthetic customer service representatives. […] By 2025 or 2030, 90% of the content on the internet will be auto-generated.”
TikTok’s Greatest Asset Isn’t Its Algorithm—It’s Your Phone
“The overriding focus on the algorithm—and the content it delivers—has caused us to overlook a central part of TikTok’s operating logic: the phone. A failure to fully explore the role of this device in TikTok’s powers of transmission has resulted in a limited appreciation of how the platform works; after all, it’s not simply content, but rather medium and context that inform how we receive information through a given channel. […] These devices, which are tightly integrated into the ways that we think and process information, have allowed TikTok to position itself as an extension of our minds.”
It’s the medium, not the message, or the engine behind it.
FakeCatcher
“Intel’s deepfake detector analyzes ‘blood flow’ in video pixels to return results in milliseconds with 96% accuracy.”
The company uses photoplethysmography (PPG) to map out the changes in color in a person’s veins, and then feed the data into a deep-learning model to gather the true nature of the video.
MUST WATCH: The Impossible Rondo
Positive use case of deepfake technology. Lionel Messi does the impossible rondo with versions of his younger self.
MUST WATCH: Nike FC Presents the Footballverse
MUST WATCH: Tom Holland In The Spiderverse
MUST WATCH: The Metaverse Is Not Collapsing. Here’s Why
Xtadium
“Xtadium uses virtual reality to put you in the seat at a number of different events, with a 180-degree view and alleged video quality that goes up to 8K.”
Notorious B.I.G.’s Immersive Virtual Concert Coming Soon
Read more about the upcoming concert here.
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.
