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Comment by slfnflctd | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing, as a clueless little kid in the 80s whose mind was shaped by popular fiction, I often suspected this kind of thing already existed back then. One of my 'gotcha' questions for adults was, "I've only ever seen him on TV, so how do I know Ronald Reagan is even real?"

Over 30 years later, while I would've never anticipated smartphones... I really thought impersonation technology through video & audio editing (not dependent upon look-alike actors) would've been here sooner. Another example of wildly underestimating the complexity of what might seem like a simple problem.

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In a sense, Ronald Regan was not real. All of his speeches were written by someone else, and he relied heavily on advisors. He was a figurehead for his administration to a greater extent than most presidents before and after. He was one of the few presidents that may have actually been innocent of the bad stuff that went on in the white house during his presidency (Iran-Contra), because he never showed any indication of really understanding it the way Nixon understood Watergate or LBJ understood Vietnam.

This is hilariously untrue. He was very well known for his “a time for choosing“ speech in 1964 introducing Barry Goldwater. It had the same impact as Obama‘s speech before the Democrats in 2004. As a union leader he gave many, many well received speeches that he wrote himself. He was politically active as a union Democrat for decades before becoming governor of California and wrote scores of speeches at that time.

From about the 1940s to the 1960s he made many radio addresses that he wrote himself. He was politically very active, touring the country and doing a lot of speeches on his own.

As a president he absolutely had the best speech writers of his time, but he went over each speech meticulously and gave feedback the writers claimed was expert and welcome.

One of his speech writers actually published a book that showed photographs of Reagan’s own handwritten notes for his speeches. There are thousands of them in his presidential library.

I think you also have to give Reagan credit for hiring gifted writers to shape his communications. Peggy Noonan is just one of several.

Thought I did?

> As a president he absolutely had the best speech writers of his time,

Yes you did! Sorry for restating what you had communicated more parsimoniously. (I'll be looking for somebody to help write my HN comments for me.)

I saw Ronald Reagan's interview with Jimmy Carson. He seemed to be pretty sharp and funny.

As another commenter has already pointed out, your assertions about his speeches is very much untrue. Also very much untrue is his lack of complicity in the Iran-Contra crimes.

He was both much better (as a writer) and worse (as a law-breaker) than your depiction of him.

Can I briefly and humorously boil your statement above down to "Ronald Reagen was probably innocent by way of sheer ignorance"?

If you consider the latter years of his presidency, as well as his immediate post-presidency retirement, it'd be more accurate to say:

"Ronald Reagen was probably innocent by way of Alzheimers"

A lot of people who met him during the last two years of his presidency described what we now know to be early symptoms of Alzheimers. He also came out publicly as having it not 5 years after leaving office.

You can, and you would be gravely mistaken.

Ignorantia juris non excusat

That's elitist for: Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

I have practically no technical knowledge of the field, so I could be way off here, but I suspect that if the technology wasn't so ripe for abuse, it would have been developed and/or made visible to the public a lot earlier

I have some technical knowledge of the field, and this is not true. The ability to do this is brand new and getting into the public's hands essentially the same time as anyone else's.

For hard evidence of this, see Russia's use of deepfakes a few months ago to impersonate Zelensky and attempt to make Ukraine think their leader was surrendering.

The deep fake was technically advanced but also laughably bad.

What would be an interesting and difficult question is whether this state of things can largely be attributed to the AI community's commitment to making advances in AI open to public knowledge and use, or if there is some stronger factor at work.

It is not brand new. The ability to replace actors in film was developed for stunt double placements as a manual process, and efforts to automate have been halted by immature male pornographic greed. Seriously. I patented a feature film quality process back in '08 and investor fascination with pornography halted further progress.

How did interest from the pornography industry halt further progress? I would have assumed the high demand for the product would have driven innovation much like how the porn industry decided the winner in the vhs/betamax format war

We had viable non-porn applications that would have made serious bank: 1) brand name advertising with a celebrity telling you (you're in the video advertisement too) explaining how smart you are for using their brand; 2) film trailers where you're in the action too; 3) educational media for autistic children (serious work here); 4) aspirational/experiential media for psychological therapy; 5) personalized photo-real video game characters.

Basically, every time we formed an investor pool after a while one of them would "suddenly realize" actor replacement applied to porn and then he'd fixate on the idea. He'd talk the other angels into the idea and then they'd insist the company pursue porn. We'd explain the non-porn higher valued applications, and the danger of porn psychologically tainting the public perception of the technology and the creators themselves. Plus, we had VFX Oscar winners in the company, why the hell would they do porn?

Why not, it sounded like you had a good amount of investor interest? Was it just moral objections, cause while items 2-5 seem fine as business ideas I would have assumed anyone trying to sell item 1 wouldn’t have cared about porn if money was involved.

Perhaps the female company president felt it was not wise? I was CEO and agreed.

PP appears to be way legit https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bsenftner

Wait what? Must hear more about this.

> "I've only ever seen him on TV, so how do I know Ronald Reagan is even real?"

This made me wondering how many among the newer generations social media addicts would think along the lines of "I've only ever seen him in person, so how do I know he is real?".

Am I on HN or /r/oldpeoplefacebook?

made me LOL

This makes no sense. And I've only heard the opposite among Gen Z anyway, amazement at seeing someone from "online" (TikTok/YT/etc) in real life.

Remove the "as a kid" part and you're now a conspiracy theorist, or one of those people.

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