CMU School of Drama


Thursday, September 01, 2022

A Day in LA with the Deepfake Artists Trying To Make the Digital World as Real as the Physical One

dot.LA: The Palisades Village is a 125,000-square feet outdoor shopping center designed to look like a luxurious resort town in a Bond movie. The pathways are cobblestone. The lights are outfitted to look like gas lamps. Every restaurant serves Italian food.

3 comments:

Virginia Tipps said...

I was really intrigued by the first couple lines of description of the Palisades. That kind of “faux-italian” I feel like was a huge style trend about 15 years ago. Think - your aunt who styles her new kitchen renovation with stone and carved grapes but inside a suburban house. This article took a quick turn into deep fakes and their technology which caught me off guard with an opening about “faux-italian”. The technology they're referencing seems super advanced and I was fooled by the tik tok they included to show the type of thing they're working on. I think that brings up a lot of cyber-security issues about being able to trust the things we see on the internet. I think they were right to point out the possible political ramifications as well. I do see some benefits the article mentions, mainly what it could mean for film. I think it is a case of how do you regulate it and do the pros outweigh the cons with this technology.

Megan Hanna said...

A part of this article which really stuck out to me was Graham insisting that all of the concerns surrounding deep fakes and other AI content are only coming from the older generation. He goes on to say that it’s only that group of people using language such as “fear” and “scared” and that the younger generations get it. Maybe I’m one of the few, but I am scared about how access to that technology could affect our lives. There have been many times on social media apps such as instagram or tik tok that someone was able to convince me they were someone else for at least 15-30 seconds using AI software. Having grown up with the internet, I am already very cautious about my own digital footprint and what I post on the internet, but with technology like this it’s possible that you can lose control of that.

Dean Thordarson said...

I had to laugh when I read the first few lines about the Palisades Village. I went to high school not a mile from Rick Caruso’s newest development and I remember the general populous being quite annoyed by his purchasing and teardown of pretty much an entire city block to be replaced with a ridiculously expensive shopping center in the middle of the Palisades. Family owned stores and restaurants that were popular among the community were bought out and replaced with ridiculously expensive chain stores and overpriced restaurants. The only benefit of the place was the free hour and a half of parking in the underground lot, which, as I have learned this past summer, is not even free anymore. As if Rick Caruso needs the additional income from his thousandth new overpriced shopping center (can you tell I don’t like Caruso? Let me make it clear: I. Do. Not. Like. Rick. Caruso.) Anyway, other than that whole rant about Caruso (whom I do Not like), I actually find the idea of deepfakes really interesting. The power of artificial intelligence these days is astounding. The one example of the Tom Cruise deepfake is just one example of this – not knowing it was a deepfake, you would have no idea. I would love to see a deeper analysis of it, zooming way in and going frame by frame to see if the editing is detectable at all.