I already had an angle to write this post but lately, the artificial intelligence that creates videos out of prompts called SORA came out and gifted me a couple of new paragraphs :) TL,DR: Nowadays, we have the propagation and adoption of fakeness and dishonesty, which is mainly rooted from Instagram. First i will try to explain what mistakes are we making in these social environments. Then artificial intelligence is creating videos almost indistinguishable from reality. This fueled us on the track that we are going the wrong way. I think, we should start analyzing and worrying about what should we avoid before it is too late.
What is the basic definition of fake? It is everything that is presented with some degree of modification or manipulation. Your voice, your look, your behaviours, your thoughts and words, the content you produce ...etc. We present more or less all of these on the social platforms. As soon as we modify something about them, we end up changing or diminishing the original. I can assure you, even to most honest and innocent ones of us are doing this at some level.
Back in the days, i have written about Clubhouse and Facebook in this blog, mentioning that we were gaining wrong habits on these social environments. I will dig a little deeper in those habits in this post. To recap them quickly. Youtube started off as a video sharing platform but gained social features and almost became new TV these days. After Youtube, apps like Foursquare bloomed and Instagram took off from the idea of sharing pictures and locations. It changed now and turned into some sort of business for a lot of people. At the end of the day, Facebook is also there as a social app, even if it struggles. Twitter made the interconnection of humans as much effective and fast as it has never been. There are other apps like tiktok and snapchat but when it comes to fakeness, i can say that Instagram and Youtube leads the pack.
Let me start with very basic questions. If you are using Instagram, have you ever posted a picture of you with a big zit on your face? Or have you ever posted a picture of you accidentally looking ugly while trying to smile? If you are posting your content on youtube, have you ever published a video even if it contains a slip of tongue and apologize for it and moved on? Or have you ever published one of your statements even if you were to require fixing it in a later time? I think you get the idea here. Have you ever shared a flaw?
Well honestly, even i am avoiding posting things that i am not fully satisfied with online. Now i think i can assume all of the answers were "nope", which probably is. Without any criticism, i will ask a second question. Are you a perfectionist? I mean does everything has to be perfect in this life? Is this why you never post anything with a slight flaw these days? Well the answer is probably again no :) Now that is a problem. We are not perfectionists, we are perfect addicts. We also want everyone to see and think we deliver the perfect.
In our everyday lives, we make mistakes naturally. I mean mistake is basically mostly an unintentional thing. Then we feel ashamed or blush or try to hide it. Internet is a wonderful thing. It saves us from this burden. It alienates us to ourselves. We keep looking at things and think everything is on track and perfect. It pushes us into a delusion.
Are we finished? No. We are just getting started. These social environments became a means to make money for a lot of people. There is nothing abnormal about this. The trouble is huge load of people flooded here with the same intentions and motivations. Then Algorithms had to come into our lives. Thus, everyone started doing the same things that the algorithm dictates to promote. A lot of similar videos emerged like fungi and they were not reflecting the creative owner's perspectives or originality. They looked like fabricated. And then everyone started asking for subs, likes and comments in their videos, which is boring but understandable for someone trying to make money. So what is the fake about this?
The algorithm gods mandates the videos on Youtube or posts on Instagram getting interactions to be promoted. After some point, people stopped begging for comments and likes. Instead they started asking for your opinions about the subject of the video, as if they care. So you'd ask, how do you know that is fake? Ok let's not jump to conclusions. I have noticed that the first 5-10 comments under videos or posts are getting likes or comments from the creator, regardless of the comment. To give an example, if i ask for your comments under this blog post and you write some meaningless emojies below and i like it. Does that make sense to you? You understand something smells here when this happens. Everything is for the algorithm. You can already see clues of this fake behaviour when you realize that meaningful comments of normal people don't even change much about the content of the creator. But you asked for a definitive proof and i gave you one. We are ruled by the world of "AS IF".
Unfortunately, ladies are a bit worse in this manner of being fake. Please don't get me wrong. There are maybe millions of girls trying to be an influencer with the help of their looks. I have tried to write my views on this subject in the post, Travelers of "that life". I am not sure what kind of past they are trying to build a future on top of. There are girls with thousands of posts without even 1 that doesn't have makeup or some Instagram filter. I am not intended to judge people here. Because they are not the only ones who posts things like they should be covering their original look or thoughts or actions or even themselves.
Twitter on the other hand, acquired a ridiculous feature lately. People started making money out of their tweets getting interactions. That place full of lies turned into full of show-offs too. People started writing nonsense just to get interaction and therefore started disseminating things. I want to say "write whatever the hell you want" but disseminating part is important here. There is no good outcome of playing with societies values or sensitivities. This habit creates mindless people who are ready to get things wrong and burst out, who are also unable to listen. As if things were not complicated enough, artificial intelligence comes into our lives.
There are supermodels created with AI on Instagram :) Don't ask me how i know this, explore page brings them to me :D These accounts makes you feel like the perfect look or life is possible, just like i have mentioned in the beginning. You feel like some ideal person or a life is possible out there somewhere. A dream of a person or a life, that can be everywhere at once, do everything at once, can look good 24/7... They are promoting exactly this. We are following some unrealistic concept for human beings on the Instagram. So we are not not just sharing fake content, we are also subscribing to fake content.
The final nail in the coffin is SORA right now. It became almost impossible to distinguish an AI generated image from reality. Even though, this is technologically exciting, (a parenthesis because as an engineer, i can't help but ask where do they get all this data to train those AI) the content they create are mostly used for creating unoriginal content. An AI photo or couple of tweets may not be that much effective to fool or persuade people.
But SORA generates videos and a video is different than an image or a tweet. Think about seeing a fabricated video of a Palestinian child carrying a knife and stabbing an Israeli soldier. This is not a typo, i am giving this extreme example on purpose. Back in the days, WWI started with a final small ignition. Do you think someone can't create enough sensation with 1 fake but indistinguishable video? The dumbf..s who tweet for money and s..thole politicians are already creating tense and sensitive societies. I can talk about it a lot more but it would derail this post. To keep us away from dangers of AI generated content, what happened, where and when questions are crucial these days. I have a mobile app that can safely answer these 3 questions together. You can check it out here.
Long story short, we started sharing fake things on the social media. Then algorithms shaped our habits and we started sharing things that we don't ACTUALLY believe or have. Then we normalized it and built a life on top of it. Then we got used to fake content and behaviour and artificial intelligence fueled it. And we ended up having fake video and sound compositions, which is an awful state. There will soon be a point where we say "Damn, i can't tell what is real or what is fake on the internet". I have a very simple caution against this. I also call this the 2000's philosophy which is shaped by politicians and rich people. It is just three words: "I don't believe". Then i guess the next statement could be "i question". You know Descartes said i think therefore i am, or i doubt therefore i am. We could say i question because i don't f..ing believe.
Now don't you think the answers to the questions in the beginning should have been yes? Shouldn't people see your grumpy face in the morning? Shouldn't a word mistakenly came out of your mouth be in your video? Then shouldn't you fix it in the next video and apologize for it? I mean are we going to call the ordinary fake, in a world where one day fake becomes ordinary? Should i say let me know in the comments :D See you at the next post :)
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