TikTok just dropped a new realistic beauty filter
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You chat with people online because you think, you know, that people exist on the other side.
You spend time on instagram, tiktok, and so, to get a glimpse of real people (as opposed to TV where a lot is fiction/sfx).
You trust photos because, barring dedicated, time-consuming and skill-intensive editing, they should represent reality.
If that’s not true anymore, and everything is fiction, it’s probably time to get back to IRL experiences.
(1) https://www.tiktok.com/@materialimpacts/video/72016630168390... (2) https://www.tiktok.com/@materialimpacts/video/72005808946403...
So what?
People have been making fictional motion pictures for over 120 years. What does Peter Jackson's, or Spike Jonze's, or your ability to make a computer-generated person appear in a video have to do with 'social is dead'?
Are you concerned that people might make videos of things that aren't truthful? The film camera, and the radio have been lying to us for over a century. The written word has been lying to us even longer, and the spoken word since time immemorial. All of this... Isn't exactly a novel development.
Do you think that 'influencer media' was somehow a more authentic form of communication than those other forms of media? If so, why?
It’s not about a cool looking ogre or background actor, it’s about a sudden inversion of signal:noise ratio for all online interactions
Obviously, you’ll still have your direct connections to people you know and trust to be real, and maybe some enjoyable “are they a bot??” interactions, but the social network experience that’s been around for the last 15 years will probably be over within the next 5.
Unless you have a personal, out-of-band relationship with that person, it has already been impossible to know that.
Until a few years ago, if I looked at the FB/IG/anything from a random person, I would assume most photos to be real, and most text to be really written by them. You could edit some photos and have some content ghost written, not everything.
Now a random person can fake everything. Would you still follow that “person”?
Why does it matter to you if the text was written by them, or by a ghost-writer, or if they just regurgitated whatever their sponsor of the week wants them to say?
As soon as a profit motive's involved, you can't actually trust a media personality. It doesn't matter one whit to me whether it's an actual person shilling from a script, or if its an artificial person shilling from that same script.
Now thus has changed. The person you have just interacted with in a video call, with authentic human reactions, etc may as well be completely a visual fake, and have spent $0 to achieve that.
I suppose digital photos already have hard time to be admitted in court:i think most digital video coverage will soon also be inadmissible. I've heard of places where high-stakes security photo registration has switched back to chemical photography, exactly to make it demonstrably harder to forge, given that the footage us physically well-protected.
All around us gets more and more virtual, no matter whether we think, as consumers, it should be, or not. We'll have to deal with it.
But paying someone to say what I want you to hear, into a camera was, and still is, very, very easy.
There have always been models and airbrushed photos, but most people quickly learn that Emily Ratajkowski is not going to return their texts and move on to real live human beings in their own cohort.
Now you make every average person into a model but only on TikTok, what happens? Probably more time spent on TikTok instead of face to face interactions with local people, at a minimum.
What happens to teenage girls when they see not just models but all their classmates rendered pretty by the machine and then compare their own reflection in the bathroom mirror?
Making deleterious things cheaper isn't great.
If that’s not true anymore, and everything is fiction, it’s probably time to get back to IRL experiences.
We just got more fiction. What you thought is true is likely not anyway, so relax. Like/dislike crowd will take care of truth as usual.
While many are excited for that I worry about niche communities that hugely depend on the internet's ability to connect with like-minded people far away.
I guess it depends on how much the niche community depends on people being visually authentic?
* Is that photo of a real person? Or is it filtered so heavily it no longer fits the definition of a photograph?
* Did nobody like my post? Or did the algorithm just not feel like showing it to anyone?
* Did that person decide to ignore me? Am I sure they're even who they claim to be? Did the platform arbitrarily decide not to show them my message, or did they get it at a bad time along with 50 others? Did they delete the app because they got sick of it?
* Am I really interacting with other humans? Or am I interacting with inhuman tools that are run by an entity who keeps its name out of the limelight and occasionally gives me morsels of human interaction to keep the ruse going?
Examine the Skinner box long enough and it will lose all of its power over you. You will switch off all of your notifications and delete all your social media apps and miss none of it. Your phone will sit in a drawer for most of the day. HN and Reddit are all that's left for me personally now (I deleted all the others), and I have a feeling the latter's days are numbered. The resulting void was quickly filled with better things. I started reading books again. And talking to nice people in public because it turns out humans are actually kind and friendly. And sunshine. Jesus, I'd forgotten how wonderful sunshine is.
There are no humans on the Internet.
There are, but human spammers & scammers.
At best you're interacting with a user agent, software that's animated largely by a human's will. Though most of the time you're interacting with an agent of, say, Meta Platforms. This agent impersonates the human you think you're interacting with, but isn't one, and ultimately just does whatever Meta tells it to. E.g. if Meta wants a post to vanish, then it does.
Even right now you're reading a post (mine) which was conceived of by a human, but you're not interacting with a human, you're interacting with a software layer run by YCombinator. I gave it permission to impersonate me, but the interaction is way different from unadulterated human to human contact.
The Internet has always been like this. The first user agents were simple so we didn't think about it much, but now these agents are becoming exponentially more complex so it's becoming more obvious that whatever you're dealing with is progressively less human.
Viewed from this perspective, it's like we're experiencing a man-in-the-middle attack on all of our humanity -- and the interposer isn't even human.
If you had AI bots like human posts then I really don't think the type of people that are into social media would care at all if a human is behind the like or not.
It is the very young now that I can see growing up being into something else besides social media but the current addicts are truly hopelessly addicted.
Isn't this one of the necessary bridges to Meta's vision? The first steps are to kill authenticity and any aspect of defect - from there it is a gentle fall into the cosseted, synthetic alterplace of your choosing. It's all so strange and I feel lucky to generationally have escaped its pull.
tv shows, movies, games, youtube pranks, reaction videos, music clips, porn, ... almost nothing is real about those media products. why does it work? because it activates the right receptors in our brains and if necessary we just pretend those are real and authentic.
I know when I'm talking to a friend that is really the person(no adding from online, only when face to face asking), and my online acquaintances from ye olde golden days are pretty locked in, and are currently good friends IRL too.
I immerse myself and build my own networks from physical contacts since. Now social medias is only a tool that can let me easily contact with them, and I have their phone number and email addresses as a backup.
I turn off every single setting I can find regarding content(ads, if you want) customization. I used FBP on my Facebook to automate that process too. I use firefox with uBo on my phone to filter the ads. Only Messenger Lite remains. Now Facebook can't draw me into their death spiral of content bombarding anymore.
I feel happier than before.
Aka : keep in touch with people you actually know. And not meet strangers or use it like a media.
A fairly large portion of social networking isn’t so much “chatting with people” as “Finding an Us so that we can get together and yell at Them”, and in those cases the dehumanisation is a feature more than a bug...
For everyone who gets jaded and leaves, someone else will sign up in their place.
Judging by the MAU of most platforms it seems that there's no slowing down though.
We've had fake faces forever. Make-up is a face face you draw on top of your face. What this filter does it 99% just what you can do with make-up.
We have lip-fillers, we have breast implants, we have fake teeth and eyebrows.
And we embrace this, we consider it essential, expected. We've given up on thinking, and given in to feeling, enjoying. Hedonism doesn't require substance, just surface.
Same goes for the website called news.ycombinator, it's very difficult to find these kind of people in real life. If I didn't know this website, things would have gone differently.
At the same time, I wonder if perfect filters like this might actually result in people rejecting beauty standards like this. I mean, if everyone can easily look this good online, if people start to think that it's impossible to determine the veracity of anything that wasn't done face-to-face, maybe people will just start rejecting it. Kind of like how I never answer my phone anymore from numbers I don't know because there is a 95%+ chance it's spam/phishing/etc.
Maybe it's because I was used to an earlier era, in which photos actually had to be developed and were taken with something called film, but I suspect I'm not the only one who finds this sort of "beauty" very unnatural and even somewhat repulsive, almost uncanny-valley style. It's like they don't look like actual humans anymore, but more like androids pretending to be humans.
In other words, this filter doesn't look "realistic" to me at all.
https://centennialbeauty.com/yassification-how-this-viral-tw...
I think this is from a couple of years ago so probably not, but things are getting meta.
It doesn't, but sadly this is early days.
What beauty filters do can be done using make up... except make up is more deceiving because since we see it in front of our eyes, we are more likely to believe it.
Make up did not change beauty standards and this won't either.
I am looking forward to the time when everyone will look amazing and everyone can live in it their whole lives, never having to see anyone ugly... when all of us transition to living our whole lives in the metaverse.
Make-up literally did change beauty standards though.
Makeup quite literally added an extra artificial step that society decided was required for women to be taken seriously in professional contexts. You might be able to make the argument that professional standards are as high for men appearance-wise (although I'd personally be skeptical of such a claim), but if you think that makeup didn't cause the standards to change for women, you're deluding yourself.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MakeupAddiction/comments/1ihkf7/que...
Very few people notice the good ones and just think it's natural.
Teenage girls are crowding the make-up sections in my local drug stores and most 15 year olds I encounter are wearing some kind of makeup nowadays. Even boys have started using make-up, although more subtle to conceal pimples and such.
But unrealistic in the sense that it makes significant changes to the user’s looks.
Sad to watch the reveal reaction videos further down in the thread.
After looking at several of the videos, you start to notice some similarities, at which point it becomes a lot more obvious.
The vast majority of normal people just don't look like that, certainly not most of the time. So if you see someone with a perfect-looking face like in these videos, either they're a professional model or they've used a filter. Not hard to figure out which one of those possibilities is overwhelmingly more likely..
Still, even if you know all that it probably won't be enough to stop this stuff from messing with your brain if you look at it often enough.
Do people actually like how this looks? I can hardly stand to watch these videos. It's hard to explain - it's like I'm watching something disgusting.
Like maybe uncanny valley? It's like I'm watching a dead doll talk.
But "nearly impossible to see" is going to last all of a week, until the people who are currently blind to them start picking up on the tells.
It's a good discussion though, because they're just going to keep improving.
I think you're underestimating the difficulty of the latter. Without direct comparisons, how do you know the filter is there as opposed to heavy makeup, plastic surgery, or it's just their face?
It doesn’t, though. Nothing what real make up wouldn’t fix.
Truly an environmental breakthrough.
Lots of people spending more time & resources trying to recreate something similar in real life.
I just hope this does not increase the already ridiculous social/peer pressure among young women to match these artificial beauty standards.
Photoshoots of celebrities have been heavily edited since forever, but I think people don’t really realise that on a fundamental level because they see relatively few. One year of this and no teenager is going to believe any photo they see of a celeb or influencer is real, and will stop chasing it.
Maybe.
Anyway, I think my point is that we’re rapidly transitioning to a world where realistic photos and videos are no longer proof of anything, and the transition between before and after will be awkward, so the more it can be accelerated the better
To me it looks like a kilogram of botox and makeup. Wouldn't date that.
The teen one didn't look good for us either. Face was too smooth, didn't handle stubble on my face. Looked nothing like how I actually looked at 18.
I don't think there's anything to worry about yet
I tried the teen one, and had a similar result. I don't think it plays nicely with a full beard, but I definitely didn't see a younger version of myself on the screen.
You need a smartphone to take part in modern social life. (Yes, adults can choose life without a smartphone or any social media, in reality teenagers can't without being ostracised).
On the other hand using smartphones and social media can also result in stress and comparing your ordinary life to other people's highlights.
Also, there are tons of things that have ostracized teenagers in the last. Why do smartphones have such a stranglehold? It seems we are becoming more and more afraid of being different.
Without a smartphone and access to the chat app of choice, you'll be left out of a good part of out-of-school socialisation. For example nobody gives out invites to birthdays on cards at class anymore, they do it via WhatsApp and you reply the same way.
Seems like most of the videos posted in that thread are just adding noise to the existing noise. (For clicks of course)
The future will be crazy.
Of course, we could have a global awakening and see through the lies the industry is pushing on us and reject this trend entirely, but I fear the former is more likely than the latter.
I wonder what attributes such comments have in common?
If teenage girls don't know how to handle this then maybe we should teach them?
what, the filter even changed the tone of the hand slightly
Yes that happened. Yes it hurt just a tad worst than you can imagine it might.
There’s an old Asimov short story, Gold, which describes a future of filmmaking that seems more similar to this than the way movies are currently made: everything is animated/CGI, but in real-time—the animators are performers as well who deliver their performance while the director offers feedback.
And once people start using these beauty filters, it's hard to go back if you're somewhat insecure to start with. Unfortunately, many of these things can be done permanently via surgery. Do we want a whole generation of teenagers that dream of getting their face "fixed" ?
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine an airbrush stamping on a human face— forever.”
Just wait until v2.0 is released. This is just the beginning.
Humans have nearly zero capacity to emotionally deal with the technology we create.
They then found out both of them had multiple plastic surgeries but still ugly genes.
Guess we're there online now too.
>It's doing plastic surgery too, on cheek bones, jawline, nose. Also changes shape of eyes, eyebrows, lips, teeth. It even seems to be doing different things to different people. (You may not be able to see all this on this small selection, but Ive been through hundreds of videos)
The problem with TikTok isn't the filters. It's the password/clipboard scraping, the enormous level of data collection on its users, combined with the fact that TikTok is ultimately a wing of the Chinese Communist Party.
The whole point though is that undetectable filters are a new thing. Like the first video said, you used to be able to know when someone was using a filter or not, and that's not really true anymore.
Plus, as some of the other videos in that tweet thread say, it's not like these filters haven't fucked with people's heads already, e.g. the photographer who takes actual photos of people and then people look behind the camera and are shocked at how "ugly" they are because the filtered view is their baseline.
An attempt to turn the West's teenagers, especially women, into unserious and manipulable adults. In America, a non-immigrant teenager has little chance to graduate high school knowing the laws of electromagnetism, or other valuable scientific and engineering knowledge necessary for society to face its challenges. Instead, they have every chance to learn all sorts of modern inventions: genders, ever more contrived notions or identity, social justice shibboleths, etc..
The result is an American public that is profoundly unserious in its approach to the world. Factually, they rely of foreign migration to sustain their core functions: healthcare, etc... They don't solve their problems at home.
When I see TikTok I see an act of hybrid warfare. I see foreign aggression against America, no different than if that power introduced a powerful synthetic opioid into the country. Flat-out aggression isn't acceptable, so they strike at us indirectly while maintaining plausible deniability. The advertising on TikTok is valuable, so many influential individuals in business will look the other way.
Only a week ago the media were up in arms about the "revelation" that 30% of teenage girls now state they consider suicide, and a 36% increase in reported feelings of hopelessness since 2011. If politicians do not speak the truth in plain terms, truly I can only consider them traitors, and jointly responsible for the additional deaths that result.
This aggression doesn't go unnoticed!
What does tiktok have anything to do with your claim that stem education is being replaced by “social justice shibboleths”?
To reiterate: the prosperity of the country depends on young people being educated in stem fields, whereas because of TikTok they are being socialized in a different way entirely.
Nevertheless, I see the connection as follows: we are forced to play nice with enemy nations because of our economic independence on them: we turn a blind eye to what fentanyl did to the middle/lower classes largely because nationally we have our own addiction to Chinese products. We could significantly reduce our dependency by producing homespun expertise, despite it being less efficient. I value independence first of all.
Re: modernism, I'm not qualified to comment, but I expect that's just one perspective on the causes of those wars.
It's just companies optimizing singularly for profit. Your tobacco companies, opioid companies, fast food companies, legacy social networks, gambling companies, alcohol companies and oil and gas companies have been doing damage to regular people for longer than Tik Tok has, and for the exact same reasons.
However, China does have the same app, under a different name. I wonder if these emotionally manipulative fads are allowed there. My understanding is that they are. Plastic surgery is extremely popular in southeast Asian countries, and I see a lot of vapid YouTube Shorts and Instagram Stories from both Asia and the West.
TikTok is extremely accurate in its emotional manipulation. I get targeted ads for it, and despite not using the app, the ads draw very heavily on specific emotions and interests. It's a bit scary, to say the least. It shows the strength of the pull and inability to escape once you're in.
And if you just realized the danger of foreign tech companies that control social discourse, don't act surprised when other countries do the same to US apps like the EU or China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMI8HWhqEc
The comments on this youtube video are actually spot on and excellent!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8314622
DonHopkins on Sept 14, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Future According to Stanisław Lem
I just watched The Congress -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) -- and WOW, it was excellent. Quite different from the book The Futurological Conference that it's based on: for example, it had cockroaches playing poker instead of sewer rats playing bridge. ;) But well worth watching for its unique take on the entertainment dictatorship. If you liked Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Looker, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you won't be disappointed! Something weird happens in the middle of the film, that's all I'll say...
>According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.
It took longer than its length of two hours to watch, because I had to stop and rewind to replay and and freeze frames frequently. (Check out what's going on in the fish tank while she's saying "I wish you could see me animated, it's pretty sick. It's like a genius designer on a bad acid trip. Oh my god, I don't know, I look like a combination between Cinderella on heroin and an Egyptian queen on a bad hair day".)
I'm going to have to watch it many more times, because there were a lot of details to absorb -- time will tell if it's up there with Blade Runner as one of my favorite movies very loosely based on a great book.
https://culture.pl/en/article/ari-folman-on-the-genius-of-st...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15175516
DonHopkins on Sept 5, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
I really loved the movie The Congress, directed by Ari Folman, an adaptation of The Futurological Congress. Like Blade Runner's relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was a lot different than the book, but shares some deep ideas, and stands on its own as a great movie.
The scene in the USC ICT's motion capture studio was riveting, with Robin Wright playing a partly fictionalized version of herself, and Harvey Keitel playing her agent, baring their souls to the giant emotion capturing machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNSTizOsws
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069100
DonHopkins 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [–]
Paul Debevec created the Light Stage to capture high dynamic range reflectance fields (including clean high resolution normal/bump/gloss/texture maps) of human faces. It uses hundreds polarized LED lights and cameras, plus lots of image processing, to separate the lighting effects of specular reflectance (glossy shine) from subsurface scattering (glowing skin), so you can reconstruct the 3D image and relight it under different conditions, environments, and viewing angles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Debevec
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage
"The Light Stage With Paul Debevec" - 360 Video (captured with JauntVR panoramic camera):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujwI4dimDA
Digitizing Photorealistic Humans Inside USC's Light Stage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6QJT5CXl3o
Paul Debevec: Light Fields, Light Stages, and the Future of Virtual Production:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAe2dUJxe3w
A Light Stage was featured in the 2013 film "The Congress", which is a 2013 film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's book, "The Futurological Congress", directed by Ari Folman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
I really love that movie and the book it was based on, which both raised some interesting issues: Like Blade Runner's relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was a lot different than the book, but shares some deep ideas, and stands on its own as a great movie.
The Congress Official Trailer (2014) Robin Wright, Jon Hamm HD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNSTizOsws
The scan scene in the Light Stage at USC ICT's motion capture studio was emotionally riveting and technically realistic, with Robin Wright playing a partially fictionalized version of herself, with Harvey Keitel playing her agent, baring her face and soul to the sparkling panoptic all encompassing emotion capturing machine.
The Congress (2013) Scan Scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8
[...]
I’m pretty sure most people are aware of this, and if they’re, it’s on them to reconsider their values things if that kind of thing has a big impact on their ego…
the rest of us will never understand why countries felt the need to regulate post-processing in fashion magazines, or why filters have any affect at all
but if its a social problem for a large population, which it is, then we have to react to that or at least acknowledge that it is.
I agree with your main point, that we should address body dysphoria… I just think that this ubiquitous meme that “beauty filters make people more insecure overall” is wrong.
The beautification achieved by these filters has been around for over 20 years. The difference is that today, that technology is accessible to everyone— any little girl can go to Snapchat and look like Kim Kardashian, and say “oh, this isn’t real.”
Whereas 20 years ago celebrities would spend hours upon hours with cosmeticians, surgeons, make up artists, and digital FX artists sculpting their image, all to appear on the cover of a magazine saying “my new diet has worked wonders for my skin!”
The playing field is more level than ever. And also, the technology isn’t going anywhere. So I think the best next move is to have conversations (especially with daughters) about taking pride in the parts of you that won’t be washed away by an AR filter.