If you haven’t seen thispersondoesnotexist.com yet - do it now. It is the creepiest thing I’ve seen online in about a week. That’s where I got the header images from - they have been randomly generated by a new type of artificial intelligence.
However, this reminds me of an incredible episode in the history of social media.
Does anyone remember back in 2011 when A Gay Girl in Damascus became a heroine of the Syrian revolt?
I’m not really spooked by it any more than, say, deepfakes. Or anymore than ThisAirBnBDoesNotExist.
It’s a cute novelty, but I don’t see a practical point to it beyond that. Once you’ve proven you can do something, I don’t need to see it again.
Perhaps kind of like when Netflix tried heavy signaling when they first released an entire season of House of Cards at once. As if to say, “This is no longer TV”. And then for years afterwards we are all scrambling how to navigate talking about TV programs with other people because nobody is watching the same serial at the same time or pace anymore - preventing conversations and, quite honestly, denying the show’s producers from learning about whether a character or plotline is working or not and allowing them to change it before season’s end.
These websites really highlight the superficiality that social media and technology are capable of. We all know to not believe everything on the internet, but we still have a trouble question that things we do see. Very interesting.
