AI Is Generating A Surreal, Endless Episode Of ‘Seinfeld’ On Twitch

“Seinfeld was famously described as a show about nothing, and that description has become something of a prophecy, as a bizarre, AI-generated Seinfeld episode has been streaming on Twitch for a full month, titled Infinite Nothing.” Source.

Great example of so called endless media. In our book Real Fake we wrote a complete chapter about Infinite Media.

De-Influencers Want You to Think Twice Before Buying Stuff

“After years of influencers pushing cosmetics, clothes, personal tech and supplements to the masses, a rising cohort is taking a different tack: telling people what not to buy. They’re calling it de-influencing.”

Apple Will Put Its Reputation on the Line With New Mixed-Reality Headset

“It will undoubtedly be a marvel and far more advanced than anything else on the market. But it will also be impractical and too expensive for most consumers. That’s because it will only last about two hours per charge, not work well outdoors, launch with a limited array of content and feature a design that some have deemed uncomfortable. The headset will also mark a strategy shift for Apple. When it entered previous categories — music players, phones, tablets and watches — there was already mainstream interest in the products. Apple’s goal was just to create something better and beat the competition. AR/VR headsets, in contrast, are still a nascent field. Consumers will need some coaxing just to get them to consider such a product. And, more alarmingly, I don’t believe Apple has identified a truly “killer app” for the device yet.”

We’re Already Living In The Metaverse

“Their goal is the same: to transform entertainment from something we choose, channel by channel or stream by stream or feed by feed, into something we inhabit. In the metaverse, the promise goes, we will finally be able to do what science fiction foretold: live within our illusions. […] In the future we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.”

In 2020, the United Kingdom’s culture secretary asked Netflix to add a disclaimer to the show making clear that it is, fundamentally, a work of fiction. In the metaverse the difference between what’s real and fake will completely disappear.

The Pastry A.I. That Learned to Fight Cancer

Interesting story, that explains how technology – called BakeryScan – that was used to identify different kind of pastries is now used to fight cancer.

How Finland Is Teaching a Generation to Spot Misinformation

“Finland ranked No. 1 of 41 European countries on resilience against misinformation for the fifth time in a row in a survey published in October by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria. Officials say Finland’s success is not just the result of its strong education system, which is one of the best in the world, but also because of a concerted effort to teach students about fake news. Media literacy is part of the national core curriculum starting in preschool.”

What can we all learn from Finland?

How Goffman helps us to understand the rise of hybrid social selves

The theory of Irving Goffman, how we are basically all performers / actors in our daily lives was a big part of our book Real Fake. The above figure gives a good summary how Goffman’s theory can be used in our digital lives. Read the article where this figure was used as well.