DarwinSaidThat! D5

This was Day 5 the session ‘Beware of algorithms’ looked into potentially tricky use cases of AI i.e. video manipulation. First thing that comes to our mind is the Obama’s Deepfake video that has emerged few years ago. The session followed interesting discussion about videos, faces, objects and more.

The point made by Hasan opens up scope for long discussions and speculations : “there is an algorithm that knows what you like and dislike. there is an algorithm that generate anything that you like. Now think about these algorithms together.” Fun part is if we think about it or not this is very much happening all the time.

Most interesting case for me was this : http://www.thisxdoesnotexist.com

This websites generates content that is AI manipulated. Faces, cats, websites, objects chairs, and so on. I wonder, to be able to generate all kinds of manipulated (fake) content makes me question all content being consumed on the screen. There is no proof (as of now) that how much of internet feed that we are seeing is for real?

Now that we know this, one may ask why is this shocking? To me this is shocking only when it is imagined closed to reality. If this was too abstract this could be entertaining. The proximity and overlap with reality makes it debatable and a provocative. From another perspective why do we even ‘expect’ internet to show us things as they are? After all we are just moving images on internet but not our real selves, that’s always with us.

DEEP FAKE EXPERIMENT using talkingheads.rosebud.ai

For a first few minutes I played around with the tool trying to play with Einstein’s quotation. However later on I found an interesting case I could explore this. There could be a funny take towards false viral quotations on internet. Few years ago I had come across the a viral quotations by Darwin which was is misquoted.

See following screenshots / sites which explores the back story:

Links : (1) https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-things-darwin-never-said/evolution-misquotation (2)https://blogs.umb.edu/quoteunquote/2014/09/23/whats-the-best-environment-for-the-survival-of-a-darwin-quotation/ (3)https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/12/19/fittest/

I was wondering if Darwin could himself deny the false quotation spreading on internet. I found few photos to make a video from. Not all of them worked in the tool. Two of them didn’t work, a painting and an old photograph worked.