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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I suspect this technology (deepfakes) will not amount to anything by virtue of creating a negative attention feedback loop. As others have pointed out you could photoshop people's faces onto naked bodies for as long as photo editing has been around. I'm sure a few hundred highschoolers do it every year, they have a laugh with their friends and then forget about it. Deepfakes being new and more high-fidelity means they have a temporary fascination about them but I don't see how the underlying activity is different. You deliberately create a sort of optical illusion to half-convince yourself that you can see a person naked when in reality you cannot. Yes the possibility of using a deepfake for libel is much greater compared to just photoshop but then again lying isn't a new invention either. To the degree that this technology becomes ubiquitous its allure will fade.

Interesting perspective.