I've got those post-sf convention distopian blues

[kestrell]

It's that state of mind that occurs for a week or two after you've been to a science fiction convention, like this past weekend's Readercon, and news stories strike you as even more ominously dystopian than usual which, after 2020, is saying a lot. But, seriously, creating your own doppleganger, you know that never goes well, especially when you compare them to cute harmless puppies. I mean, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?!

Deepfakes Are Now Making Business Pitches
TOM SIMONITE
08.16.2021 07:00 AM
https://www.wired.com/story/deepfakes-making-business-pitches/

The clips are presented openly as synthetic, not as real videos intended to fool viewers. Reeder says they have proven to be an effective way to liven up otherwise routine interactions with clients. “It’s like bringing a puppy on camera,” he says. “They warm up to it.”

New corporate tools require new lingo: EY calls these its virtual doubles ARIs, for artificial reality identity, instead of deepfakes. Whatever you call them, they’re the latest example of the commercialization of AI-generated imagery and audio,
https://www.wired.com/story/covid-drives-real-businesses-deepfake-technology/
a technical concept that first came to broad public notice in 2017 when synthetic and pornographic clips of Hollywood actors began to circulate online. Deepfakes have steadily gotten more convincing, commercial, and
easier to make
https://www.wired.com/story/cheap-easy-deepfakes-closer-real-thing/
since.

Comments

[metahacker]

I keep wanting to show up at meetings as an animoji, Apple's face-motion-driven cartoon avatars, and have everyone else doing the same.

It's much lighter on bandwidth (only have to send the pose of each face) and then no one has to worry about background or hair or whatever. It could even fix gaze angle en route so it looks like people are or are not staring at you, your preference...

Voice is harder to fake, though. We are so critical of uncanny valley there!

[kestrell]

I know, I am *so* picky about sound: I get cranky about people in Zoom meetings who don't invest in a half-decent microphone, and sound as if they are standing at the bottom of a well.

I just reread _Snowcrash_, and so I'm feeling a little nostalgic that we seem to have completely skipped the phase where we get to create our own avatars. I like your idea a lot.

Random question: I'm writing a guide about privacy and security for people with visual impairments, and I'm trying out different browsers that focus on privacy: what do you use, if that isn't too personal a question? I've been using Brave a lot.

[metahacker]

I use Firefox, with a bunch of extra extensions (Privacy Badger, uBlock). At home we have a PI hole set up which drops requests for ads; it kinda works. Google has figured out how to route around it already.

But privacy on the net is largely a foregone conclusion now; we're being observed by the distributors themselves, a continuous man-in-the-middle attack, so mostly I just deal with it.

[kestrell]

I agree that there is only so much one can do regarding privacy, short of making it an obsession, but what bothers me is that visually impaired people aren't taught *anything* about how big tech and browsers track them, or that they may have choices that reveal at least a little less about their private lives.Thanks for answering my question, I've been meaning to try out Firefox for a while. I just signed up for "Hacking for Beginners" on Hackers Academy and, while parts of it don't seem to be accessible, I'm liking the intro to Kali linux, which pokes at my ancient memories of UNIX commands.