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?

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.

> 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.