I love to see the cultural differences between korea/japan and the West on the matter of artificial stuff. Whereas in the West people would try to hide fakeness as much as possible, people in the far East have a much more candid view of it.

In the West we do understand and like artificiality, but we really want to contain it to the realm of fiction. When some artificiality spills out in the “real” world we raise red flags: “tssk, this temple is not authentic, it burned down 80 years ago and they rebuilt it from scratch”

In the East, there is a deep philosophical difference that I would like to understand better - if anyone can point to any reference on that matter? It’s like people have understood that fiction and artificiality are part of our lives, cause people embellish things all the time, and we humans are happy when we believe in things. So instead of being suspicious, they let themselves invaded by artificiality, not unlike the way Western people create emotional connection with novel characters, but in real world situations.

And I mean why not? In the West, we get cartoon character-based advertising, we get actor-based advertising. How is AI-based influencer (that doesn’t hide the fact that it’s artificial) is any different? If Tony the Kellogg’s tiger had an instagram account, we’d find it totally normal. Here is the same, except that we just jumped over the uncanny valley.

There is a lot to talk about on the subject and doesn’t fit in a hn comment :-)