TikTok just dropped a new realistic beauty filter

My 2c: it’s the beginning of the end for some tech areas. Especially social networks.

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.

Or even more stringent verification will become the norm.

I wish that was true. I wish that were true. In practice, as virtual experiences become better and more realistic, I would expect people to spend more time in virtual environments, not less

We are so close to this reality. I made this TikTok video through a workflow of Stable Diffusion (Python), DeepCQ/Finclout, ElevnLabs, and Di-D. And if I with my limited ability can reach this level, someone with more able hands (and budget) can reach much higher levels of reality. Social as we know it is dead. But then, if you look at TikTok it boils down to Boobs, Quizzes, and Twitter screenshots.

(1) https://www.tiktok.com/@materialimpacts/video/72016630168390... (2) https://www.tiktok.com/@materialimpacts/video/72005808946403...

All of those things have had extremely perverse incentives leading people to be dishonest for a long time, long before the internet in the case of photo/video (see Loch Ness Monster, Sasquatch video). I don't see how AI tools have much impact. Most people knew this about AOL chatrooms in 1996. Does anyone actually think internet interactions are mostly authentic, or are you speaking on behalf of some imaginary clueless person?

On IRC/AOL, you don’t see a face. But still, probably some real person did write what you read.

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”?

Just as videogames, though. Or do you think this fake reality will actually replace “real world interactions?”

Or it’s time to sign up (or get back) to these networks because someone will make better content based not on looks and personalities but on an art of impression and interesting plots instead. Personalities are dull and template, especially looks-based ones.

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.

Previously specifically real-time video was hard to forge, that tech was out of reach of a typical person who could not hire actors and do seamless real-time video composition.

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.

isn’t this already real thing, and called make-up?

I fully agree with you. Within the next 5-10 years the internet will be unusable to connect with real people anonymously because everything will be AI generated/enhanced and nobody can be sure whether they talk to a person or a computer.

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.

> And if I with my limited ability can reach this level, someone with more able hands (and budget) can reach much higher levels of reality.

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?

Yes, but the democratization and commodification is scary and dangerous.

> 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.

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.

> Previously specifically real-time video was hard to forge

But paying someone to say what I want you to hear, into a camera was, and still is, very, very easy.

Once it becomes cheap enough to make indistinguishable fake online personas, there will be a flood of commercial, spam, and scam accounts that make it impossible to know who among your online connections is real and who isn’t.

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.

This 1,000%. If anyone's struggling with social media addiction, doom scrolling etc. and this little rabbit hole intrigues you, keep going down it:

* 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.

The difference to the last 120 years is that after the Internet brought the cost of distribution down to almost 0, now the cost to create clips and movies will follow along the same path. Why pay an actor/actress when you can now generate a human out of thin air ? Why pay for scripts when ChatGPT can just auto-generate something that is good enough for a 30 second clip? I don't think that truthfulness or authenticity is the part that I am concerned about. Movies used to be a shared social experience. The more content is personalized we are losing this shared social experience which might lead to more isolation and conflict.

You don't see a difference between "someone with millions of dollars can do this in post-production" and "anyone can do this in real time, so you can't trust anything except in-person conversation to show you someone's face and voice"? Just because they might still lie at that point doesn't mean it's justified to go full nihilism and say difficulty doesn't matter.

The incentive was always there but now the cost is lower.

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.

Money is difficulty too. If fake video is ten dollars an hour, or one dollar an hour, that's a lot easier in practical terms than hiring an actor with high availability and a willingness to scam people.

> There are no humans on the Internet.

There are, but human spammers & scammers.

If it's just speaking a preset text, yes. Doing a dialog in a way you specifically want, without a pre-made plot, is rather hard or impossible with an actor. Now you can put your brain behind a made-up face, in real time, for peanuts.

It makes sense and I would like to think this, but fear people will find a way to make themselves comfortable with this.

> Once it becomes cheap enough to make indistinguishable fake online personas, there will be a flood of commercial, spam, and scam accounts that make it impossible to know who among your online connections is real and who isn’t.

Unless you have a personal, out-of-band relationship with that person, it has already been impossible to know that.

It’s business and all business is show business baby! Look at all these great startups promising all these shiny things we so desperately need. I think it may be good advice to be wary of anything on the internet, or in the media. In a world so connected it’s amazing how disconnected we really are. For how fucked up everything is, we will need the fake reality being built. Just remember that the consumer demanded it, and that you must be nice and diverse to everyone and whatever.

There aren't, that's the deeper point. Only cyborgs exist on the Internet, that's all there has been from the start.

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.

Or if you, you know, you talk to people. Which is perfectly possible even online.

i think most people care very little about authenticity. pretty much not at all. that's why this will have zero negative effect on social media. rather the opposite as it fits right into the contemporary value system.

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.

And so I keep a friend list that are really my friends and acquaintances on my Facebook.

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.

i would say it's the beginning of a new generation of true social networks.

Aka : keep in touch with people you actually know. And not meet strangers or use it like a media.

> You chat with people online because you think, you know, that people exist on the other side.

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...

I doubt it. This is just Myspace angles for a new generation.

For everyone who gets jaded and leaves, someone else will sign up in their place.

I just don't know about that. If you go on Reddit during a major sports even there will be thousands of people posting to no one about their thoughts on the game in real time. "Great play!" along with 100 other comments on that particular play that no one is going to read or interact.

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.

> 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?

I hope so. But the alternative is that people double down on social networks and their fake virtual lives.

Judging by the MAU of most platforms it seems that there's no slowing down though.

> There are no humans on the Internet.

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.

With things like ChatGPT it doesn't matter. Text will also be dead then.

I really like how you articulated it!

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.

Social networks are bad for the reasons you outlined, but where you are wrong is that we'll actualize this understanding of fakeness into abandoning social networks.

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.

Social media has been a blessing for me to be honest, I'm going to hell for saying this, because I'm going against the grain, maybe you meet people in real life that are amazing, but I don't. I see a lot of skilled people, funny and cool people on social media, I get things from social media, that I can't get in real life.

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.