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.

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”?