Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp
mothership.sg
mothership.sg
The majority of “influencers” are young women, and only a minority would want to follow a 50 year old uncle. I don’t think there’s much we can do about it, it’s human nature. It does however limit the diversity and world views people are exposed to and sometimes it’s nice to see the world through the eyes of a 50 year Japanese biker.
One interesting side effect of this is that some of the most popular male YouTube channels I follow never show the host's face. Everything is carefully staged to only show their hands / body.
I usually don't watch the whole video as it can get a bit dry, but otherwise it is nice to just see someone expressing themself without shilling their Patreon or using clickbait thumbnails and titles like the more commercial "personal" channels do.
(BBC radio is at the very opposite end from begging for likes; once someone establishes a show, if it's not in a highly contended timeslot it can basically run forever no matter how obscure or unfashionable it is, until the presenter dies)
https://www.youtube.com/user/featony
Although there was one where you did get to see his face.
AvE? Just hands.
Marco Reps? Just hands... wearing gloves.
LockPickingLawyer? Just hands.
BosnianBill? Just hands.
The Signal Path? Largely just hands, although he has appeared occasionally.
Wendover Productions? Disembodied voice.
CGP Grey? Disembodied voice.
Real Engineering? Disembodied voice.
Not to mention innumerable video game streamers.
Of course, disembodied voices aren't in-and-of-themselves a new cultural phenomenon: Radio has existed for years, as have podcasts. And there are TV formats like nature and history documentaries where the narrator may rarely or never appear on screen.
And even on Youtube, there are a number of female voice-only celebrities - for example "vtubers", where a female voice actor plays games while pretending to be a cute anime girl. Of course, one could say that's an example for the theory people want to see beautiful women, not against
As far as privacy it doesn't necessarily apply because the famous ones almost all have previous careers as face streamers, and their fans know who they are since they use their real voices. But if you are doing it to hide yourself then it works, and it means that everyone else can interact with you and seem to be in the same world.
I watch art, some crafts occasionally tech and pop commentary. Some sport.
I dont see people being interested in 50 years old women either in general.
For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like subscribe share" I just turn it off. I have no idea why people like watching other people begging impersonally for attention.
Same here. There are some YouTube channels I really want to watch and follow as I can learn new skills from them, but the constant begging and over-dramatization is a real turnoff so I cannot watch it without feeling bad about it.
I have a similar feeling about people who takes photos of themselves all the time and their social feed is filled with the photos they take of themselves. I can't take a photo of myself without feeling vain, and I'm getting passive-vain feelings when I see friends of mine posting selfie after selfie of themselves...
Plenty of good creators do this (as it works), just to keep up with their peers. It really has nothing to do with the quality of the rest of their content. Don’t blame the player, blame the game IMO
I would far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a video roll than be subjected to in-content advertising and begging from the creators. Certainly, creators would prefer to do their thing instead of beg and scrape.
What can we do to accelerate micropayment tech and patronage communities for creators?
> far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a video roll
I don't think this holds true for most people. PPV TV has always been kind of a minor thing, and eclipsed now by all-you-can-stream services. The feeling of continually inserting coins, or the taxi meter running, is uncomfortable to many people.
This is true, but I think fails to be a good counter-example. PPV has always been expensive and focused on single events. What we haven’t seen is AWS style small payments.
Imagine if instead of paying $100/mo for cable TV, we could pay $0.25/hr. If you watched TV 24x7, you’d pay more, but the vast majority of people would pay much less.
The main problem with smaller amount PPV and micro transactions in general is that it is hard to get the billing/accounting right. But this is something that could vendors get right. You only pay for what you use, and what you get is billed in small enough increments that it makes sense for everyone involved.
How this could be applied to online videos, I’m not sure.
Micropayment news services have existed (Blendle). Unpopular.
Pay-as-you-go prepaid cell phone service is also niche. So is the a-la-carte gym membership. It's not that billing/accounting is difficult. It's that it plain straight up makes less money. SAAS vs one-time upgrades, etc.
The reason for that is that it's much more expensive than paying by the month. I wanted pay-as-you-go specifically because I have nearly zero need for cell service, but would prefer to be reachable even if I'm not at home.
But you can't get a pay-as-you-go plan with pay-as-you-go pricing. T-mobile's monthly plan now is "$15" (actually something like $16.60) per month. The pay-as-you-go plan would cost less than that, given usage rates, except that it also costs $1 for each day you use it to any degree. The incredibly high minimum fee overwhelms the already small advantage of not paying for service you don't use -- as soon as you use any service, you get charged for more than a full day of every service, and then you have to pay a usage rate on top of that!
Make them nonprofit foundations democratically run rather than middlemen biding their time until they can increase their margins or sell to a megacorp.
You're not wrong though. Most creators probably hate asking for stuff.
Personally I refuse to do this and my channel on youtube still grows but it is probably growing a lot slower than if I had been begging.
Since I do it for fun and not profit I couldn't give a damn though.
He is the only one I can think of that doesn't do this and it makes me personally much more inclined to watch him. He also feels "uncommercial" even after 10 years I think it's fantastic that he is able to keep it that way.
While I haven't taken time to measure this out to academic standards, it's extremely obvious in niche interest channels - eg I'm into synthesizers, and there's a whole little subsystem of review videos, technique videos, not-talking demos, jam sessions etc. The more heavily branded/self-promoting presenters tend to get vastly more views. My favorite reviewer centers the equipment under review and makes occasional appearances talking to the camera, but his maximum views tends to be near the average minimum for reviewers who center themselves, eg always being on-screen in a box, mirror, or direct-to-camera shot and always showing their face and a relevant emotional reaction to the subject of the video in the poster frame. I'm sure the same patterns play out in many other specialist topics.
To some extent this may be a product of the Infamous Algorithm, but it might also reflect cognitive preferences of viewers in that many people prefer to have information mediated by a recognizable presenter whose reactions and emphases become more meaningful with repeated views, while others like me find an overly-expressive presenter distracts from the material under discussion and gravitate towards a more subdued/restrained communication style.
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan distinguishes between 'hot' and 'cool' media which employ more or less intensity to solicit and maintain attention. 'Hot' styles with a charismatic and overtly solicitous presenter seem to be more popular in general, so even people who don't like that style may end up adopting it to gain viewership in a competitive market. There might be a market opportunity here for catering to different kinds of viewers, eg a 'CoolTube' for people who strongly prefer a more low-key presentation format.
Incidentally, I sometimes do prefer hot 'in-your-face' sort of media, especially on things like experimental music videos or the occasional guilty pleasure of a cheesy monster movie. It's just a hunch, but it seems to depend on things like a rapid tempo of editing and high levels of discontinuity/unpredictability rather than spatial maximalism.
Lots of educational channels I watch do it, and I fully understand why they do it.
I used to as well but realized platforms like YouTube effectively force the creators to do it.
I also recommend this blog post about the best way to ask for subscribers: https://reneritchie.net/how-to-get-subscribers-on-youtube-ev...
I've never done any of these things, and I'm not sure I have the stomach for it, but I consider it required knowledge for anyone with any interest in leveraging online attention.
My point was simply that I find it unappealing pleasure viewing, so I don't understand wanting to watch them do it.
I am aware two things:
1.) If they earn money from youtube, they need likes and subscriptions so that youtube algoritm shows them to more people.
2.) I as a programmer earn more money with less effort then them. I also very likely have to deal with less bs (like harassments and jerks trying to insult you or take you down for lolz).
A combination makes me accept that these people are doing entertainment as work, I consume that entertainment for free and thus am absolutely fine with them trying to succeed.
There is also absolutely nothing wrong with entertainers wanting attention. That is what pays their bills, without attention they cant be successful. Attention is not dirty word to me.
I do too, but not without first hitting the dislike button. I only wish others would do the same.
People who don't say those words exist, but you won't find them very easily. There's a reason for that.
Nagging and soliciting subs and likes is fucking annoying. If you want me to like a video, make a good video and stop nagging.
If I dislike those naggers enough, maybe Google's stupid artificial non-intelligence will eventually learn to recommend only videos from non-naggers. I try, even though I don't have much faith in Google's algorithms.
And here I'm telling that maybe people should stop listening to annoying naggers and just dislike & close the tab, maybe block the channel too if it keeps coming up in recommends.
I mean really? Do creators realize that viewers could be interested in several dozen channels and don't want to swamp out their own notifications since Youtube's prioritization gets shittier the more you subscribe to? Sorry you aren't in my top 10? Maybe a video got popular on an algorithmic whim...
I'd much rather they ask me to join a Patreon, which I am very keen to do if the content is good and continues to do so. But pulling that "peek behind the creator curtain" crap puts me very off because it's like trying to shame you into behaving differently as if you're part of the problem.
No... you decided to make Youtube your source of income. I don't owe you crap.
It’s actually a problem with all “favorites” on every platform. A browser bookmark system with notifications (a little dot) would be great, because then you can sort/categorize/describe/thimbnail/speeddial it, but platforms crave for stupidity and make it a non-configurable list instead.
Marketers have known this for years before the appearance of "influencers" - youth sells, and a young women have better cross-gender appeal than young men. Go ahead an open any pre-WWW paper magazine, count the number of women vs. men who appear in the adverts for non-gendered products
There have been plenty of times during history during which nobody cared what young people thought. I'd venture to say the majority of it.
And the commenter didn't say "only". Yes, people follow non-sexual influencers all the time, but it's much easier to get followers if you're sexually attractive.
Is this actually true, or just bias from your own interessts? If we look at technical stuff and gaming, we see far more successful male influencers. Similar with entertainment-industry.
> and only a minority would want to follow a 50 year old
This more or less is true, because not many like to see unattractive people doing boring things. But the point here is, this in not because of gender or sex, it's about the quality of content and chemistry with the consumers. An old ugly guy without any real skill, would be usually as unsuccesful as an old ugly woman without any real skill. Though, for both there always is chance to find niche to sellout your content over something, the chance is pretty low.
With younger and more attractive people, the chances are significant higher, because they have more selling points besides the content itself, thus they sell better. But it also depends on the target-group and content.
> it’s human nature
No, it's human culture. People sell according to the crowds reception on what the gender is suposed to do. So woman sell better in female-stuff, men better with manly stuff. Woman do have a slight advantage, in that they are the gender which in most cultures is educated from early days to sellout. They dress up, use fancy cloths, catter to the people, etc. This works better for laymen when becoming influencers, because woman have more likely the skills to sell themself on a broader are, while most men need to learn it first.
In both cases, I think it would be fair to call that niche real skill.
Cute women doing traditionally "male things" sells like hot cakes. Not so much the other way around.
True, but are really bad in selling serious Business stuff.
https://www.ostan-collections.net/wiki/index.php/List_of_Can...
* not so imaginative, but always consistent and on-model in ways Westerners don't feel any pressure to try for
Say you need a safety warning tables for your railway station - pandas dangerously fussing with selfie sticks on a crowded platform are much more enjoyable and memorable than just some more generic stick figures doing the same.
You can also encode culture into mascots - everyone probably knows the bear mascot Kumamon (yes, there are many bears in Kumamoto and they occasionally eat somebody) but take forever example Shimaneko, the mascot of the Shimano pprefecture. Neko means cat and indeed its a cat mascot - with a strange hat! And that hat is the roof of the ancient and famous Izumo shrine located in the Shimano prefecture.
Or the even more obscure Kinosaki Kounori: https://mobile.twitter.com/jrw_fukuchiyama/status/1046927976...
On the picture you can see a young female anime character in a summer kimono (yukata).
This is the mascot of a limitted express train (!) that goes from Osaka and Kyoto to the famous onsen (hot spring) town of Kinosaki (hence the Kinosaki in the name). The the other name Kounori is from the name of the train, Kou no tori - oriental white stork.
Which goes right back to the founding legend of Kinosaki about how they built the first bath after observing a stork using the natural hot spring to heal its wounds.
And the last thing - the summer kimono/yukata. If you look closely she also has a ticket stamping tool and a railway company employee badge - that's because station employees really do wear yukata in the summer in Kinosaki instead of their usual uniforms! :)
And the kimono pattern includes of course the oriental white stork but also - fireworks! And that's because of course in the summer there are regular fireworks shows in Kinosaki! :)
Really some much culture and symbolism (not to mention hard work!) goes to japanese mascot characters!
I think it depends of your style. Of course I wouldn't want to see an uncle if I were looking for sexy girls being rad, but I would love to see a 50yo uncle tell biking stories, motorcycle repair, or his brand of manly zen.
Definitely no one wants to see an uncle posing as a young girl, and I am also intrigued by why did an uncle wanted that badly to feel admired on Twitter in the first place. Someone younger I would understand.
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-popular-youtubers-with-...
I wonder if this is at play with these two cases?
It's also telling how male the list is.
The top 26 list of YouTubers is filled with influential people, and many people would say that they’re influencers, but they’re not typical examples.
And that "skill" is based almost entirely on being attractive.
And these days, with camera and video filters, even that's not necessary any more.
In the old world of professional climbing, when the magazines decided who was worthy of attention and accolades, sponsorships were generally handed out according to merit.
Now days, sponsorship is shifting more and more to climbers who are media friendly and good at drawing attention to themselves. Top tier climbers are now refashioning themselves into mediocre youtube celebrities, with mixed results.
Pewdiepie was obsessed with having the most subscribers. Mr. Beast did little else than obsess over the Youtube algorithm for many years on end.
Also, 50 year old people tend to have ideas which are frowned upon in the Valley. Especially if they're not from the US.
So when enough people start following them, they get removed.
Now you're an alt-right sexist person and anyone subscribing to your channel is one step away from shooting a school.
Want to influence people? Use faceapp to change yourself into a face people feel good seeing (pretty girl strikes the correct neurons in majority of viewers). In the best case limit everybody does this and hopefully it stops being effective. Worst case every influencing person does this anyway?
Why do we even really care about real world appearance, appearance is something that we have very little control over and if we've accidentally created something in the internet that allows folks to escape their appearance can't we just celebrate it?
We seem to be accepting that gender identification and body dysmorphia are both real things that people deal with and this meta-society where you can look however you please is probably a really helpful outlet for those who don't like how people judge their appearance from day-to-day - I think it's important that we preserve this freedom and try and ascend beyond judging people by their meat-bags.
They effectively play an animated character live and voice it as they perform it's facial expressions.
On the subject of Japanese gender changes, a most interesting one is played by a Japanese female artist who plays a male character that looks like a female once again. — this artist has a particular habit of creating male characters that look as though they be female.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRkO-V29fFw&ab_channel=Spiri...
No doubt people felt good about following "her" because of her authenticity.
Most young people aren't that interesting. Older people tend to be more interesting, but no one wants to look at them.
It's like when movies show Charlie's Angels or James Bond fluently speaking multiple languages and efficiently wielding various weapons and skiing like Olympic skiers. You know that's not real. Any one of those things takes all your time to master. But it makes for a cool movie to bundle them all together.
And maybe people fell for it in part because we watch nonsense like James Bond. So it hit that note and didn't immediately set off alarm bells.
You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom dancing.
Introduction to Wines: https://sha.cornell.edu/admissions-programs/undergraduate/ac...
Introduction to Handgun Safety: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...
Cross Country Skiing: https://scl.cornell.edu/coe/pe-courses/spring-pe-courses/sno...
Swedish Massage: https://courses.cornell.edu/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=...
Ballroom Dance: https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/SP20/class/PE/1153
Of course the advantage of going to Waterloo is that you can probably pass the Google coding interviews.
In most of Svalbad you need to carry a rifle to defend yourself against polar bears.
I’d say that there’s not many of them if they go to school there.
I'm not sure if they're offered anymore, but they used to have Basic Rifle Marksmanship and Epee de Guerre. My friend once told me he thought my major was "weapons".
It was one of the hardest courses I took at university - so much memorization of various wine regions around the world, grape varietals, etc.
That's your problem, but at you had:
Underwater Linux .iso Distributing
The Computational Fluid Dynamics of(strictly hypothetical) Human Sexual Intercourse in a Canoe
Outdoor Code Golf(Winter Session)
"E-Sports"
That’s not the Waterloo that I know
SimBudweiser?
Pretty sure James Bond's handgun use is more on the unsafe side of things. I mean, he does have a license to kill and uses it frequently.
By learning it I mean being proficient with it that you're smooth and comfortable with it, and can make your partner look good.
That's pretty much all you get in most undergrad courses anyway. It's usually an intro to, or first taste of, a sophisticated subject that would take a long time to master. It's only after many such intros (i.e. many hundreds of hours of study) that the student will begin to develop a more sophisticated understading of their chosen field.
In that light, is a 1-credit skiing course any different from a 1-credit astronomy course?
For example, when walking, one sets the foot down heel first. With ballroom dancing, it's ball first.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/2005-seabrook.pd...
Distributed and Massed Practice: From Laboratory to Classroom RACHEL SEABROOK
"Meaning something" personally and "being interesting" are not the same.
Also there isn't that much wrong with just exploiting popularity machine. So a bunch of people thought you were a young girl, and you're not... who cares! If anything you are teaching people to stop putting so much credence into the SM sphere... which can only be good.
Even if a person is a simple product of their times, as one gets older that gets increasingly interesting. Because the times change so much over the years.
"Middle age is the period of age beyond young adulthood but before the onset of old age."
I can't read Japanese and I used Google translate for the post text (so maybe there's more depth that's lost in translation), but the pictures look to be pretty "generic influencer". None of those pictures look any different than what you would expect from a random 20 something influencer. Additionally, the text on the tweet is pretty much "I like motorcycles" along with "her" age and height. Everything here seems to be pretty much the same "here's a pretty girl in front of something" post that instagram is full of.
Again, I'm only going off the pictures and Google translate, so if someone who understands the culture better wants to correct me, feel free, but until that happens, I'm going to believe there's nothing more to this than a bunch of people wanting to look at a pretty girl.
Edit: Ran the tweet in the article through DeepL at the suggestion of some replies. Here's the translation so you all can come to your own conclusions:
٩ Everyone!
Do you have a bike?
Spring will be here soon
Age: Showa era
Height:166
Lives in Ibaraki Kumamoto
I love to tinker with motorcycles
Comment: Life is once, play this world
If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot of really important details that are utterly lost on you.
That being said, this is the Google translation of the tweet in the article:
Minasan ٩ (ˆoˆ) ۶ Do you have a motorcycle? Spring is coming soon Age: Showa ○○○ Height: 166 Living: Ibaraki I love: messing around with bikes
Like I said in my last comment, I know Google translate is far from perfect and I'm very open to being proven wrong, but I have a hard time believing that there's some deep insight in this post when that is what Google translate put put out. The translation seems pretty "influencer" to me.
And the guy took his money with a straight face and sold him the boots even though the color of the boots signaled he was a trainer or something, which is something the nouveau riche guy had no way of knowing. But it would have been immediately laughable to most people who were in the know.
I am not going to go through the account and try to make up BS, but the bike may be custom built, the gear he's wearing may be amazingly good, the locations he is posting from may be something incredibly special in some way and not commenting on those details may be part of the appeal.
I'm a writer by trade and I get paid by the word and also have to meet other constraints and you can sometimes say very little with three paragraphs or you can say a metric fuck ton with a few well-chosen words.
I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just know that when things get popular, it is often due to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular.
A density of quality info and yadda is often some element of that and that is often not obvious to outsiders who cannot readily tell that this photo is some superficial tripe and that seemingly similar one is worlds apart in quality, data, informativeness, whatever.
Anyway: This is my insomnia talking. It is absolutely not intended to be ugly or pick a fight or yadda.
You have a great day/night/whatever.
A dogwhistle, basically? "Dog whistles use language which appears normal to the majority, but which communicate specific things to intended audiences."
Dogwhistles are most often associated with politics, but the idea goes beyond that (unless you classify all asymmetric/broadcasted communication as political, which is not without merit.)
Of course all of this requires self-drive and personal determination / willingness.
All the examples you gave are totally possible. There may be something about the bike or the locations being visited that are special, I really don't know. Even if that is the case, that's not really what OP was claiming and not really what I was responding to.
There are tons of little reasons this account could be popular, but based on the little research I did, I don't think it's because "she" is making posts full of wisdom, years beyond "her" age.
^^ this
Thank you. Wish I could pay you per word for this. Hmu@samir.ist
Most of his posts are very casual, but his goal is still to ride the bike rather than fix it everyday so that is the bulk of what he shares. His tone is definitely targeting a less experienced audience. In some of the posts, there's light-hearted trivia about niche topics. He's appealing to a younger generation. Getting new people involved in what looks like an exclusive hobby is always exciting to see online.
If you don’t to divulge too much on the finance part, I get it.
That's just one of the things I do. I also blog and do resume work and my blogs get some support from Patreon and tips.
But I have learned a whole lot about writing well doing it on a paid-per-word basis. That's been a real growth experience for me as a writer developing my craft.
I know bikes, I know Japanese, and I lived and road in Japan.
The translation is largely accurate (just minor structural stuff that doesn’t matter).
The only content that might matter, and it doesn’t really seem to, are the hashtags for the tweet that were not covered above (roughly “connect with bikers” and “quick biker self-intro”).
While I agree with your general characterization of Google translate when dealing with Japanese content, in this case it did a decent job, largely because the content was very simple and straightforward.
Specifically, even though “Showa ??” was translated accurately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone knows what it means (born before Jan 89, that is, the Showa era).
If so, good point!
These are meaningless differences that only people who don't speak Japanese notice. Because once you do, you'd know that the text being in English instead of Japanese is already such a large difference that picking at individual words doesn't mean anything. (And honorifics definitely don't mean much. Even if you "leave them in" for "correctness", that actually means leaving in the ones the kids know and taking out the ones they don't.)
Actually one of the translators for a lot of popular works recently left Twitter because kids kept harassing him because he was "wrong" because the official work didn't match rumors they'd started based on their incorrect Japanese knowledge. Hope he's not doing that.
Fwiw, being born in the Showa era (ended Jan 89) would put her at 31 as a minimum.
Minor nitpick, but I just noticed the Showa ?? birth year in the tweet, and that would have raised red flags for me. Even for Japan, the doctored pic doesn’t really look 31, much less mid-30s or older.
Edit: Your translation is mostly correct (The second line is more like “Do you bike?”, but it sounds more natural in Japanese).
Note that this tweet also has a self-intro for motorcyclists hashtag.
The shift from 20s to 30s for females in Japan is generally not a welcome one — pressure to marry, have kids, “settle down”, etc. are very real. It is also perceived that women in their 30s are not as “cute” (something often sought after, especially by public entertainment figures).
Or if someone is just privacy conscious about details that may be used to steal their identity, they may have just randomly chose January 1, 1970 or whatever was the top choice on the little menu.
James Bond is like The Dread Pirate Roberts and gets played by someone new every few years. Only the name stays the same.
They are not, but I think people will get better at realizing this the way many now know what it means for something to be "photoshopped" whether they can identify it and subsequently dismiss it or not.
I believe that physical "good" looks, analytical and social intelligence, trade and athletic skill, and artistic talent will eventually converge as our future "stars."
Those are not truly useful skills anywhere except this one ecosystem.
We’re at the stock market has gotten competition from cryptocurrency’s, and social media becomes less service oriented and more of a layer.
Sort of like photoshop enthusiasts knew about and admired skill in the tool but the public generally had little familiarity.
As photo manipulation became common “photoshopped” as an idea was more commonly understood.
Maybe this Maybe that
This type of argument is toxic. Adds little to the conversation. If you can back any of these maybes that would be great...
Edit: the power output curve is also not for the faint of heart and there's no electronic helpers, overall very different to ride compared to a current 600cc model with all the bells and whistles :-)
That said... when Jonathan Goldsmith was auditioning for part of The Most Interesting Man in the World, the ad agency called his agent and said, "We really like him, but we think he might be too old," and she replied (quite masterfully), "How could the Most Interesting Man in the World be young?", implying it would take a lifetime to acquire the achievements.
So I guess the answer is, be old and good-looking, like Goldsmith, or Sean Connery.
I have many relatives and friends who are amazing at skiing. My cousin posts pictures every winter of the sick lines he skis down.
I'm neither an excellent marksman nor skier, but I don't think it would be difficult to become excellent at both given an excessive amount of free time within a few years.
I can though drive a manual very well, own a sports car, and have no fear of drifting it.
A coworker of mine was a pro skydiver, and recommended it to everyone. I've met other skydivers as well; it's supposedly easy and affordable.
Another coworker owned his own plane. Planes are costly but he wasn't James Bond rich...
My brother-in-law owns a few hundred guns including fully automatic weapons.
Being James Bond is a bit idiotic in real life as he engages in a lot of high risk stuff, but it is certainly doable.
The internet changed that.
Now it's a function of perceived popularity and perceived influence. That has become a (cheap?) proxy. It's not the person per se, but the "social proof" attached to that person.
We've been trained to use quantity instead of quality. Is that human nature?
Attacted to a pretty face? Yes. That is human nature.
It happens to be a skill that influences require for their work.
Here, I see no problem; where I see a problem is that often those who hire judge those on their beauty where their beauty would play no factor in their performance, not only hurting those whom they would hire, but their own finances in the processes.
Of course, the scariest part of all is how much more easily the ugly are found guilty on the same level of evidence than the beautiful.
And while there is a skill to "beautifying up" people, that only works to a certain degree and can't change the looks you were born with, it can only enhance/hide them in parts.
But you can't learn to uncrook your nose just like you can't remove your acne scars trough learning or straighten out your ears. These things don't require learning a skill, they require surgical procedures you most likely can't perform on yourself even if you had the skills to do so.
As I said, any skill has a component of talent and acquisition.
Most men can train their entire lives and will never have the skill at chess José Capablanca had when he was six, simply from watching others play the game. — every world chess champion that ever lived was born with talent of the game most others can only dream of.
> But you can't learn to uncrook your nose just like you can't remove your acne scars trough learning or straighten out your ears. These things don't require learning a skill, they require surgical procedures you most likely can't perform on yourself even if you had the skills to do so.
Just as an average man cannot ever reach the level that chess grandmasters had when they were 8 years old, even if he trained for his entire life.
This is a massive exaggeration. There's no way it's true.
> Just as an average man cannot ever reach the level that chess grandmasters had when they were 8 years old, even if he trained for his entire life.
I found the results of the world chess championship 2018 U10. [1] The best ones of the 10-year-old kids here are rated slightly higher than 2000 elo. And 8-year-old ones play significantly worse. (Also with the Internet these kids have access to all the knowledge in the world and typically have top coaches which Capablanca hadn't.) Do you really think it's impossible to reach 1900-2000 fide for an average man who trains the entire life?
[1] https://info64.org/world-cadets-chess-championships-2018-u10...
It is indeed only an undocumented family story of the family that is hard to prove. However, such things as that Bobby Fisher at the age of 13 played what is now known as The Game of The Century against the best North American player at the time to victory, or that Capablanca beat the Cuban Chess Champion at the age of 11 are documented facts in history.
These chess prodigies amassed skills in the game at very young ages that most could never achieve in their lifetime.
> I found the results of the world chess championship 2018 U10. [1] The best ones of the 10-year-old kids here are rated slightly higher than 2000 elo.
And none of them will rise to the exceptional levels of Capablanca or Fischer, will they, many of them will be forgotten and never become professional to begin with.
Apart from that, 2000 Elo is already a higher rating than many serious club players will ever achieve. 2000 elo is candidate master level.
> Do you really think it's impossible to reach 1900-2000 fide for an average man who trains the entire life?
The average man? absolutely. Those that train their entire life are already 90% skill in chess.
And that's hardly the issue, even if he could if he trained his entire life, the exceptional professional players in chess that so earn their livelihood achieved 2000 at around 8-9 years old. 2000 is not close to a level that allows one to play chess professionally, for which 2550 is probably needed these days.
Most human beings on the planet lack the talent to ever be a professional chess player, no matter how hard they train, — it is no different from tennis, football, darts, or beauty.
Just to add on that.
"Though women make up 77% of the influencer market, male influencers are paid almost 100% more. " [1]
And 88% of female influencers are less than 34 years old. [2]
So 67 % of influencers are young women (if 34 years old is considered young)
Also women get 10 times more like than men [3]
[1] https://klear.com/blog/influencer-pricing-2019/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/893733/share-influencers...
[3] https://www.influencerbay.com/blog/the-future-of-influence-i...
This isn't entirely surprising. They're much more rare so there is lot more competition for their services, piled on top of the usual biases in our society against paying women equally.
That's 31% more, not almost 100% more.
But thats how suply-and-demand workforce always work doesn't it? Too much people doing the same job tends to lower the wage for that job; and because a lot of companies compite for different markets when sponsoring a male influencers vs female influencers (e.g. "this is the shaving cream I use" vs "this is the bra's brand I use") they are income-wise 2 different jobs.
It would be great to see Adolfo Mateo[0] as a 20 year old Japanese girl, not that he needs any improvement as he is.
My general heuristic is online personas from attractive people are often over valued (specifically considering the value of things they say/do - not their ability to make money which is huge) and when you compare pretty people with high follower numbers to unattractive people (or just people that don't lead with their prettiness) with high follower numbers, the latter are often better quality/say more interesting things. Someone leading with their prettiness has a big advantage in getting attention, even if what they say is dumb.
There's a lot of pseudo-intellectualized bullshit on twitter that gets a lot more attention than it would otherwise because the person is young and pretty, but would not get nearly the same attention if they looked different.
It reminds me a lot of Liking What You See: A Documentary, which is the last Ted Chiang story in his first short story collection - I think it's worth reading.
Obviously attractiveness is only one factor among many, but I suspect it's a much bigger factor than people currently think.
I remember reading an article in the French press, about two women founders that mailed the off-site dev team under the moniker of Mike and Bob.
They were fed up with being second guessed on business decisions and had found out that 'Bob' was getting less pushback than 'Marissa'.
Although sometimes amateur models don't realize what the job of a model is, or they get groomed by fake photographers and end up making bad softcore porn by accident.
I also don't think there is an issue here.
I certainly would.
I know this is being perceived as "fraud" right now, but the same people who were attracted to that person and now feel betrayed are overdue for some well-deserved self reflection.
It's hard to make an argument that the world would be worse off if everyone could just have the body they want. Regrettably, I was born too late to live to see it become reality.
Older men chasing younger woman and replacing their previous wives? Completely unnecessary.
Child sex crimes? Someone can just morph into a child and hook up with someone with the same interest.
Unattractive but a good personality / similar interests? Not a problem.
Trans? Just morph into a woman / man.
If we had video footage of, say, a politician doing something clearly illegal on camera, then it's simply the word of the politician against the word of the source -- the latter of whom may need to remain anonymous.
That said... the other way around is still the more dangerous, I guess. If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the US president doing/saying something really heinous, that has the potential to inflame the world long before the truth can get its boots on.
> I guess. If, say, a US adversary creates a great-looking video of the US president doing/saying something really heinous, that has the potential to inflame the world long before the truth can get its boots on.
By the time this becomes possible, it will be widespread knowledge that deepfakes exist.
And I don't think knowing the deepfakes exists will convince everyone. Plenty of fake photos already get passed around on Facebook and what-not, even though Photoshop has existed for decades.
For example, picture a video of Trump saying in private committee 'I want to fuck that nigress'. That would be extremely heinous, and probably be a fake, but can you be 100% sure from a president that also said 'grab them by the pussy' ?
The line between real and fake news is becoming more and more tenuous.
Sure a deepfake is convincing on a low resolution compressed video, but what about a 4k or 8k video where lens distortion and fine details are everywhere? I don't have a lot of confidence that facial pores could be convincingly simulated.
Let's say there was video recording of a politician in a hotel in Russia, to pick a random example. We would already expect it to be low-quality video even if it was real.
But why? The cheap last-gen iPhone in my pocket can take 4k videos, almost everybody has something like it in their pockets. Quality is cheap and will continue spreading, fuzzy video that looks like it was taken on a 90s camcorder will itself seem suspicious.
https://copyrightimage.com/2018/05/09/better-image-upscaling...
This is from 2018, which is an eternity for machine learning research.
Here's a random example:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6619284
They can detect a persons pulse from tiny variations in head movement, I'd like to see a deepfake simulate that! And it's not about this one thing, I'm sure you could design against these tiny measurements one by one... the key is that there are a lot of them and a deepfake is going to have to simulate an enormous amount of data in order to pass what will become trivial tests for realism. This is made a much easier weapon against deepfakes when you have progressively better videos.
This is currently possible by just using a screenshot from a game and an app from the AppStore: https://twitter.com/nillxzero/status/1369452664979943427
Stalin did it nearly 100 years ago.
And even with deep fakes, we'll still have fingerprints, DNA, phone and car tracking, facial ID systems in public places, etc.
People accepting everything at face value is not going to stay a thing when world+dog is going to abuse their new powers. Only fools would believe what they see after they've been fooled a few times and suffered the consequences.
Short term it's going to be a mess, but long term it's a good thing for us to figure this out and move on.
Videos should be cryptographically signed, and verified once online. You can spoof certs but you can't really fake the cert authority
The value of it is that the legwork only has to be done once, instead of requiring everyone to independently do it (which would basically turn every accusation of crime into a DDoS against the accused).
Then you can get people into court testifying whether they used a given piece of equipment to film something, edit something, etc. and you can guarantee that you are watching the exact output of that chain of recordings, edits, etc.
As I said, not a thing right now. But also not that technically hard to build. Right now we're just trusting witnesses that might be lying through their teeth without us knowing or being able to prove otherwise. Once we had such capability; anything else would be inadmissible in a court and no self respecting journalist would touch equipment without this capability. Why would they?
A deep fake would look plausible but lack this chain of evidence.
There is no known solution to the analog hole.
A blockchain is more wasteful, but a service requires a leap of faith in the provider.
JusticeCoin ICO when??
I tried hard to avoid using the word block chain in the original comment to avoid exactly this kind of knee jerk response. But yes, kind of an obvious tool to use to record chains of evidence in a tamper proof way. Glad you jumped to that conclusion as well.
Contrary to the popular belief, not every block chain based thing has to be an investment scam. I don't think we need a separate coin for this; just a shared repository of truth and fact with full auditing. Blockchains are kind of designed to be that. If you know a better way, please provide it.
And just to pre-empt it, obviously my preferred flavor of block chain for this would be miner free proof of stake rather than proof of work.
It's a problem of trust within society. Look at many very mainstream conspiracy theories these days: there's ample proof that it's not true, but people want to believe so they'll believe.
You can't fix the lack of trust in society with cryptography.
I just went on a constructionist website I sometimes lurk when I'm bored, literally the first story I find is titled `The Age of "Credentialism" and "Experts" is over. Every Single Institution works against your interests'. You can't fix this mindset with maths.
Video is cryptographically signed? But what about the secret computers in the Pentagon's basement that run on Quantum CPUs using ancient alien technology found in the pyramids? They can certainly break ECC. Here, watch this Youtube video...
The institutions could start telling the truth once in a while. Statements like "27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London" (BBC) and "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" (CNN) with the city burning down in the background account for why trust in media is rapidly approaching zero. It makes it clear that the violence and devastation is just a curiosity to the upper-class elites that control these institutions, but normal people who actually have to live with aftermath are not amused.
Fauci is another huge contributor. First don't wear masks, they can actually hurt. Then you have to wear masks. Now wear two or three! But earlier he was ridiculing people who wore multiple masks. Along with all the knowingly false statements about how long lockdowns would last. Clearly Fauci should not be allowed to speak in public, but unfortunately the blast radius of his mistakes extends beyond him to the government and media institutions that defend him and amplified his misinformation.
No exaggeration there ◔_◔
I get that you're complaining about 'liberal' media downplaying disorderly and often dangerous events such as riots to suit a political agenda, but the converse is also true; if one relies on 'conservative' media then you'd think many major American cities are post-apocalyptic smoking holes in the ground.
I want escape hatches. I want plausible deniability. Facts in a vacuum are useless and can be used to propel all sorts of narratives. Facts without framing and contextualization aren't worth much. You can manipulate easily without technically lying, just by cherry picking facts that suit your agenda.
You need some amount of trust and solidarity if you want to live in a healthy society.
If you see a video at a date D1 where you say Statement1, and cryptographically sign it with your key K, then at a later date someone can verify that at least you said you've watched an backed your statement.
In a way all of security relies on the physical safety of some kind of secret data. So you have the deniability of key compromise in any case.
If everything a president states publicly is signed with his key Kp, then:
1) If something controversial is published without signature, the president can say it's not standard procedure and a plausible forgery;
2) If the president publishes officially without a signature, the public can demand one so there's no later equivocation;
3) Anything that has been said can be verified in the future by checking the presidential signature.
In this case, the worst case is really a compromised key (although key scheduling should mitigate it), but most forgery cases of statements (and potentially documents, mandates, etc.) are eliminated.
In practice, it would be difficult to get your public figures to sign everything they say (and difficult to get them to accept this kind of potential auto-incrimination for the public good).
Your solution is technologically cool, but I think the current system of "was this published by a domain controlled by the office of the press secretary" is probably accomplishing this case well enough.
The troubling aspect is that all of this bullshit is blending together. My dad watched Fox News. Now he's hooked on Youtube conspiracy garbage. I'd be terrified if he ever became a QAnon type. We're dealing with literal internet cults becoming a mainstream phenomenon. We're nowhere near equipped for the mess we, the technologists, have made. You have Alex Jones out there claiming that an elementary school shooting didn't happen. You think these guys are going to trust encryption? Or anything that their Youtube priest tells them is a "hoax"?
Education would be the answer. But education is at war with engagement algorithms and attention spans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
The goal is not necessarily to convince people of a particular claim, it's to levy so many claims and use the scrambling of media acting in good faith to vet those claims as an overloading mechanism to get regular people to tune out entirely.
The answer to this (and the accompanying tribalism that pervades public discourse nowadays) is often said to be education and critical thinking, but that requires years of investment and often-unwelcome external discipline to internalize and actuate; it's a statement of what we would like to have instead rather than an actionable solution to its own absence.
Friendly emotional persuasion can work better as a de-escalation-bridging tactic, as suggested here: https://dr-gleb-tsipursky.medium.com/how-to-talk-to-a-scienc...
This is also helpful for gathering information to understand the dynamics and attractiveness of false information, even if no changing of mind can occur; think of it as the difference between carefully dismantling an unexploded munition in order to figure out how it works vs. a controlled explosion to minimize future risk at the expense of continued vulnerability.
Where conflict is unavoidable or deliberately fomented (eg people arguing in bad faith rather than sincerely believing falsehoods), an overtly hostile response imposes a cost on the aggressor, and when consistently and predictably applied it effectively alters the payoff matrix in an adversarial game: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
Many people are aware of Mutual Assured Destruction as a kind of nuclear diplomacy, where you are deterred from nuking me because I've made it very clear that if you do I will take you down with me, leading to a heavily armed but uneasy peace. There are also lesser-known concepts like Power Transition Theory (about how wars originate from weaker countries challenging stronger ones) and nowadays scholars of international relations tend to adhere to Hegemonic Stability Theory (one very powerful country plays Teacher/cop) or World System Theory (every dog has its day). Developing familiarity with the broad concepts of interstate conflict (without going too deep down any intellectual rabbit hole) can be helpful in modeling smaller scale political conflicts, divisions in civil society etc.
But nature doesn't create deep fakes - though not as the term is being used here. I would argue that nature has been making deep fakes for millions of years.
Anything that is created by CNN Deep Fake tech is delivered via computer - either using printer or with some sort of screen screen. Let's eliminate printers as nobody uses them anymore. What about screens? I smell a business opportunity.
Reality has a pretty strong "hash" naturally built in. Even manipulated picture carries a huge amount of information that isn't changed or isn't changed as much as one thinks.
The manipulated pictures the motorcyclist uploaded still would give someone a good idea where and even when they were taken. That doesn't matter here but if you're making a more detailed argument, it's harder.
Just consider, "computer forensics" is a thing even though any single bit on the computer can be overwritten and "faked".
This seems overly optimistic, and requires people to themselves suffer unambiguously from the doctored evidence.
On an individual level, regular discovery of police and prosecutorial has not led widespread reform in those areas. And on a larger scale, even after things like the Gulf of Tonkin people largely accepted claims of WMD's in Iraq.
Acceptance of evidence is socially constructed. If it's politically convenient to go along with the beliefs of your faction, and you're rewarded for saying increasingly ludicrous things in public, then people are going to do it.
1. https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2019/11/04/content-authent...
The people that care about figuring out the truth and critical thinking will probably still figure it out.
Others will believe crazy things for stupid tribal reasons despite contrary evidence.
That said though, make forging evidence a crime of the utmost seriousness. Also, /more/ cameras always makes deepfaking harder.
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." - Mark Twain
"...there exists a family of expressions contrasting the dissemination of lies and truths, and these adages have been evolving for more than 300 years. Jonathan Swift can properly be credited with the statement he wrote in 1710. Charles Haddon Spurgeon popularized the version he employed in a sermon in 1855, but he did not craft it. At this time, there is no substantive support for assigning the saying to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill." [0]
Rumour the swiftest of all evils. Speed lends her strength, and she winds vigour as she goes; small at first through fear, soon she mounts up to heaven, and walks the ground with head hidden in the clouds. Mother Earth, provoked to anger against the gods, brought her forth last, they, say as sister to Coeus and Enceladus, swift of foot and fleet of wing, a monster awful and huge, who for the many feathers in her body has as many watchful eyes beneath – wondrous to tell – as many tongues, as many sounding mouths, as many pricked-up ears. By night, midway between heaven and earth, she flies through the gloom, screeching, and droops not her eyes in sweet sleep; by day she sits on guard on high rooftop or lofty turrets, and afrights great cities, clinging to the false and the wrong, yet heralding truth.
Today, lying with video is really expensive, but if in the future everyone is able to do it and everyone knows that it's possible then we're back to he-said-she-said, which is how society has worked since the beginning, except the last 200-ish years. I can easily lie and say I saw Bill Clinton murder someone in 1990. Maybe in the future I'll be able to generate fake video evidence of it just as easily as I typed out that sentence. If everyone has a feel for how easy it is, then so what?
The danger is in the transition, when lying using video is affordable by a select few, and not everyone knows about it. Then it's powerful. If you're worried about that then we need to develop and teach this technology as quickly as possible. We can also do something fun like collect a time capsule of important videos before this becomes easy and timestamp it in a verifiable way (by posting the hash to a blockchain or some authority for example).
To stick with your 'Bill Clinton murdered someone in 1990' example, if you are Alex Jones and you say that then I will be skeptical gien Alex Jones' serial unreliability. But if you deepfake yourself to resemble a (hypothetical) real person called Albert Johannsen who died in 1995, and manipulate the video to look like old VHS, then the authentic-seeming testimonial can be 'discovered' by someone clearing out an attic or storage unit, and then merely publicized by you-as-Alex Jones, who merely reports the claim of the discover (actually a collaborator of course).
There is an endless variety of of applications, eg you have really committed a crime and video exists, but you produce a deepfake of yourself committing the same crime multiple different ways or the like, such that everyone thinks You Did It but nobody can agree about exactly how or to what extent and you escape justice due to the ambiguity (albeit with diminished future prospects).
I see this concern brought up frequently but I don't really think this is a big deal. In the grand scheme of things, ubiquous availability of video cameras is a fairly new development. Video cameras themself are a fairly new development.
We had a functional society before video evidence and we will have a functional society after video evidence.
There was a very short window of time in which we had somewhat reliable video evidence but it is now coming to an end and we will manage.
I would think that the number of false positive convictions declines with the advancement of new technology, and that this is perhaps a temporary setback.
There was a time before fingerprints and d.n.a. evidence as well, both of which have been very helpful not only in convicting the guilty, but in exonerating the innocent, and if ever come the time that it be feasible and affordable for a layman to plant fake d.n.a. evidence and fingerprints, that would be quite a setback for criminal forensics.
"That picture was Photoshopped" doesn't work as a defense because it's not too difficult for experts to tell a Photoshop from a genuine image, nor to interview someone at the scene of an alleged event and learn the truth.
The same will be true with deepfakes, only much more so, because there are so many more ways to give away that it's a deepfake. Video adds new dimensions of scrutiny like how well the fake face tracks the head, matches lighting and expression, etc. Deepfake detection is in its infancy but you can bet it'll be even more accurate than Photoshop detection.
The deepfake stuff can be solved with public/private key crypto anyways.
I don't see this as a paradigm shift as much as a continued slide down the slippery slope of normalized propaganda.
-- How often are politicians caught on camera doing illegal things now? I don't recall this happening very often. The bad behavior on camera I remember from way bad when ("Abscam") was an FBI entrapment scheme so you have more than just the video as testament.
-- The most common "guilty by camera" situation in recent years have been cops and when a scene from an event where other facts are known gets filmed, you need far more than face manipulation to make a fake that's going to be plausible.
Chinese deepfakes are going viral, and Beijing is freaking out
https://www.protocol.com/china/chinese-deepfakes-regulators-...
Imagine what happens when you present someone with the voice and/or image of their loved one and pitch a product, plant an idea, or execute fraud? What happens when an emotionally unstable person is harassed by the voice of their lover or even a deceased relative.
Now imagine that you could rent some computing power and perform a million of those frauds in parallel. Psychological warfare will never be the same.
When people tell me the robots are going to kill us someday, I always reply that they won't have to, they'll just need to convince us to kill ourselves.
This will hold true for deepfakes. It means that we might start judging the character of a person, their surrounding information (e.g., who they know who vouches for them) instead of the core information itself. It'll be a bit like how cybersecurity involves trusting the trust of trustworthy sources: not perfect, but doable.
Also,as most states are 2-party consent for video recording the scenario you described would have a huge evidentiary rules hurdle regardless of the deepfake capability.
[ 1993 ] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
Wishful thinking. A cursory glance at twitter or facebook will show you that it very much matters what tribe you're from.
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
After all yes if you're an old guy people will discriminate against you in who they follow, and among other things, he just exposed that fact for the world to realize.
The guy changed his looks using a filter, it’s nothing that haven’t been done to death by the kardashians. The novel element here is just the sharp contrast between his before and after personas.
If an heterosexual man pleased himself while watching that totally safe for work content, it's on him and no one else. The body did not even change and the photos are not suggestive at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gay_Girl_In_Damascus
Fun fact, the lesbian girl who outed him also turned out to be a middle-aged dude.
MORPHEUS: Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are different, the plugs in your arms and head are gone, your hair has changed. Your appearance now is what we call 'residual self-image'. It is the mental projection of your digital self.
NEO: This... this isn't real?
MORPHEUS: What is 'real'? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/lil-miquela-digital-avatar-in...
I think some of the critique in the former was lost (i.e. Weezer), but it definitely opened the gates for popular digital avatars.
https://www.ginx.tv/en/twitch/who-is-code-miko-the-virtual-s...
I mean maybe there is a tech point, that hair has historically been a pretty hard thing to model, so I'd presume hard to correct with a filter - so maybe its his luscious locks that helped sell the ruse (and I'll need to wait another few years to have my hairline pseudo-restored)
In fact, it's popular in the transgender community. People can experiment with their new gender identity with a few clicks. You can transform a bald masculine figure into a soft model with long hair that retains some of your bone structure (and vice versa). Here is a tweet of one such transformation done on an actor using a stack of FaceApp filters: https://twitter.com/KaiqueBanks/status/1276185681660968961
Here's the ad for the hairs feature: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=600497397462983 (Apologies for linking to Facebook, it seems that they only advertise features there.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czK6ReYbaTk (Conan, 1m43s)
I can understand why people find Instagram influencers entertaining, especially the ones that appear to be attractive women. It's obviously entertaining enough that it's a realistic career option for many attractive women. But to me, believing that what you see on Instagram is real life is like someone in the 90s believing that tabloid newspapers at grocery store checkout aisles were real life. We should all know better.
As human socialization occurs increasingly in digital spaces, will be interesting to see if there is a rise in trans people who only wish to transition using technology without wanting to change their own analog physical appearance.
Similarly, I wonder if there are remote workers who use filters like these to consistently present an idealized version of themselves professionally.
I predict within the next 20 years, having an avatar that is more attractive than your true physical form will become normalized. Perhaps some middle aged people will only present as their 20 year old selves online. I'm sure transracial avatars will be a controversial issue.
Maybe I should short cosmetics and go long on GPU manufacturing.
Oh, this for sure is already happening. A lot of people's profile pictures (for example on twitter) are frozen in time some 10 years ago.
That's already pretty normalized looking at how even a lot of older generations are carefully curating their social media presences to make them look as perfect and impressive as possible.
In any case, it seems fair that a person represent their online image any way they like. Who's to say how this man 'identifies'? He does.
He self identifies as a 50 year old man. He admits that he just did it for attention near the end of the article.
Instagram biker chicks might be annoyed because he's a competitor, but anyone else?
[1] https://apnews.com/article/9ef16f52e9b94b9a838b17a63c6c1e8d
But honestly, the people who have that association or who view following an account as some kind of relationship should be taking a look inward about why the physical characteristics of a biker are so important to them in the first place. I don't feel a huge need to make it easier for people to do something that I feel like they shouldn't be doing in the first place.
Down that road lies the segment of the Internet that gets mad when they find out a woman streamer is married because "she should have been upfront about it." And I just don't want to touch that part of the Internet with a 10 foot pole. I'm not worried about their ability to form unhealthy, one-sided relationships with people they've never met.
If you're interested Netflix has a wonderful documentary called Disclosure [0] about the media's portrayal of trans people, women in particular. I highly recommend!
And while I'm assuming the person in question identifies as a man based on what he says, he(she) might not, and might just be in the closet saying the right things because he knows the environment he lives in. If that's the case, the article might even be harmful since it reinforces that this is a persona and never even touches on the idea that it might be a representation of his(her) actual gender identity.
But in either case, the big thing to me is that the article is harmful because it makes it everyone else's business. It creates this world where people are expected to validate that avatars online match physical bodies. Another way of looking at the question of whether or not this person is in the closet is that none of us know this person in real life, and it's kind of messed up that we're jumping behind the veil he put up so that we can validate whether or not he's transgender or nonbinary or what.
He doesn't owe us any of that. He doesn't owe us coming out of the closet, or staying in the closet, or explaining whether or not there is a closet, or justifying what he's doing. Even in the real world when we see nonbinary people, we're not owed some kind of explanation of their entire world; not unless that's something they want to share. So the article turns something that should be a personal decision into a curiosity that needs to be explained, to the point where the media actually tracked this person down for comment rather than just leaving him alone.
An article that talked to someone like this and (consensually) explored his motivations on his terms might be normalizing, but to me this comes off as the opposite -- it comes off as reinforcing that people should be shocked by gender fluidity.
Even from the perspective of, "he's just doing this to get more clicks," who cares? I just don't see how it's a problem for him to present himself however he wants to present himself.
At some point for some people "digital avatar" became a dirty word, and I don't understand it. I don't think he owes anyone online his real-world face. He doesn't owe them some kind of disclaimer either. If people online are following him because they think they have some kind of parasocial relationship to a girl, that's a personal issue they should think about on their end. And in any case, everyone online already has a persona they project; I have a persona and a set of characteristics and attitudes I project when I post on HN even though I don't hide my real name or identity. Knowing me on HN is not the same thing as knowing me in real life; if I'm allowed to do that, why can't he?
So he extends that to his face. Maybe he(she) is a woman but hasn't chosen to let people know yet. Maybe he's genderfluid in different places. Or maybe he just wants to have a woman avatar on social accounts for whatever reason. None of that is a problem.
This is fine even though he seems to identify as a man outside of the Internet; he doesn't have to identify as a woman to do this. Unless he's running around doing something genuinely harmful or trying to troll women, then let him choose how he presents himself online regardless of whether or not it matches his normal day-to-day gender identity.
"Getting more clicks on Instagram" isn't a horrible crime or deception that we should be concerned about.
The only problem is he/she is not "real" woman. This person is clearly presenting themselves under different gender, and here is large number of people harassing them/her/him.
For the youngsters in the crowd, we used to have these phone numbers you could call where you could be connected with a "sexy woman who would talk to you and fantasize with you." Guess what, the only requirement for the job was "sexy voice" not actually being all that sexy. Poor chaps paying $1/minute to have phone sex with 45 - 50 year old women who not only have sexy voices but know a thing or two about sex.
"Influencers" are, as a money making entity, in the same genus as phone sex, product salespeople, and actors. They are there to create an attractive illusion that increases sales/market activity around an attached product.
As I remember it, not even that was a requirement. In Germany a lot of these services ran the ads in a dual way: The big number advertised was for men to call and cost money, and then somewhere in the corner was a number that was free to call for women.
They didn't really screen that women number, teenage boy me had no problems at all getting connected to poor guys paying per minute, anybody could just call there as long as their voice sounded high-pitched/female enough.
"The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. ...
Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these."
I'm not saying I wouldn't be fooled, but the female face looks too smooth to me, not in a make-up way but in a post-processed separately to the rest of the image way (doesn't appear to have the noise that the rest of the image does?).
[then again, why believe that 50 year old man photo is the person's real face or hair? Surely media photos have been Photoshopped since long before face-swapping apps?]
If you’re asking yourself why females tend to have more followers than males, and males get more followers when disguised as a female, remember that the “attractive” part is neither female nor male, not even human. It is our notion of perfect attractiveness that is completely made up and females exploited that since forever because sexual behavior asymmetry (women attract, men approach).
In a world without makeup, uv filters, clothes and odor deception, almost everyone is a red uncle biker.
> Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
He of course chose the goddess, but still breaks the gender dualism and got rid of his age.
Could generate trees of filters applied to your content, with a separate channel output on each leaf.
Breed the filters that work, kill off the ones that don't get the clicks. SEO for your appearance.
But her hair doesn't actually match his hair. So that's not it, either.
These shows are all about shock, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were fooled as well.
Anyway, unless faceapp has improved a lot, I'm sceptical this guy was always able to show as the same 'person'.
With the rise of digital avatars that are testing the limits of photorealism, I'm wondering if your actual physical appearance starts to become less of a limiting factor for things like this though.
Heck, there is now an entire K-pop idol girl group launching composed entirely of digital characters. While not 100% perfect, I'm shocked at how realistic they look and act:
https://www.koreaboo.com/news/ai-kpop-girl-group-deep-real-a...
Not sure if the Woke crowd have organised an outrage yet.
But it's something to think about. Woke people are evil which unfortunately means we've stopped a lot of forward or intelligent thinking, which we shouldn't do.
I think when you publish publicly you lose certain rights. And that's what Twitter users are, mini newspapers. So I don't mind him/her, him and her, being outed. But it's also interesting to think about. Avatar rights and our relationship to our avatars.
It's hard to understand yet what all this means. Or what's going on here. Maybe it was for money.
If you like reading fiction, Claire Norths 'Touch' really makes you think what is life without a body. Her stuff is quite novel.
I have to testify that in Japan there is a wave of fashion and TV celebrities affecting a public discourse of "oh no the Japanese industry will be soon dying because of the push for electrification of all vehicles!".
Also, most of the loud (and very suffocating, when they zoom past you) bikers near my home are either old men (like this man) or in some cases their children.
Was this Youtuber trying to do his best to save the youth's interest in motorbikes?
I would really like to see these kind of bikes fade into oblivion, instead of being promoted to youngsters through "deep fake young idols" Youtube channels.
Is going to be replaced at by computer-rendered photos/videos, some voice actors and a group of interns answering the chat.
I imagine, as this sort of thing becomes more common, we'll see image "verification"/signing being a feature on all cameras, and eventually extend to mobile phone cameras for photos/videos as well.
Plus, how does one guarantee that light hitting the camera sensor hasn't already been manipulated?
What we see on the web are mostly resized and heavily compressed images. Not sure how such a cryptographic signature could work in such cases.
Sure, if you want to use it to try and prove you did take/create an image of something, but it doesn't help prove you /didn't/
Honestly, this man is brilliant. He's old, leaving this world soon, and is capitalizing on what people want to see. I commend this man. That said, I think cat-fishing is not cool if you're actually playing with people's hearts. If he's DM-ing people wanting to meet up, then it starts getting weird.
https://twitter.com/i/events/1372500525346820099
Watch the light grey mic - Biden's hands can't decide if they want to be behind or in front of the mics. There is clearly editing going on.
We aren't talking about reptilian aliens running the government - video editing is not some supernatural phenomenon.
Maybe it is good thing , remember that song from a few years bacl "it wasn't me" is now a rather a plausible excuse.
Seriously, the world is full of talented performers, but they lack the look or image that the entertainment industry demands. I look forward to seeing how this progresses.
I would not use this word in any other context, and in fact, cannot use another word in the porn fetish context because there are no non-offensive words to describe the fetish which I am aware of at the current time. Apologies to anyone who may have felt offended, this was not my wish and there is a very clear difference between a person and a fetish.
One day she decided to mix/merge her face with Jennifer Aniston's and that was a game changer for the business in terms of audience engagement.
Here is a sample. https://www.instagram.com/p/CMKWQ6QFH6a/
https://twitter.com/i/events/1372500525346820099
An army of "fact checkers" has been dispatched for damage control.
Even if it were a real young woman, why would anyone look at those obviously fake images? It is like someone from the 90s used paint to paste a random image on some random biker's head.
Also, why go through the trouble of having that hair and a real bike to begin with if the audience's sense for what is real is so low? You might as well take random images of empty parking lots and copy paste random bikes with random bodies and a young Japanese woman's face on them and it would look the same or better.
Person used filters and makeup to make themselfs look better and younger. This never ever happened before! OMG, call the police!!!!!
This article is not a tech demo or deep dive, it's gawking at a man "pretending" to be a woman. It reinforces the idea that trans women are just men "pretending" to be women.
It's not too many steps removed from something like Ace Ventura, which went out of its way to explicitly frame trans women as "gross". Yes, over time media has gotten a little less explicit about this, but there's definitely a long tail of media that's like, "Look at this weird trans/trans-adjacent person over here..."
I don't understand how someone who wins the lottery feels, and no amount of education will change that either.
At some point we need to realize that it's not someone else's job to validate whatever feelings and internal shit that we got going on in our heads. At the end of the day, it's not anyone else's job to "identify" with your preferences, and if someone thinks that your sexual preferences are gross, that's actually OKAY.
I think many people assume that everyone needs to be okay with everyone else's preferences, but not only is that totally unrealistic, but what does it accomplish? You're not going to rid malice and evil from the world by accepting everyone's preferences, so what are we trying to solve by "educating" everyone about transgenderism?
If 50 year old woman presents herself younger, it is not big deal. We see it every day in celebrity magazines.
So this person presenting themselves under different gender, is the only reason people talk about it.
I think this was only a news story in Japan because feminism / LGBTQ rights in Japan have a long way to go before people feel comfortable being themselves in public.