#how to spot a deepfake

[reallytoosublime]

This video is all about the dangers of deepfake technology. In short, deepfake technology is a type of AI that is able to generate realistic, fake images of people. This technology has the potential to be used for a wide variety of nefarious purposes, from porn to political manipulation.

Deepfake technology has emerged as a significant concern in the digital age, raising alarm about its potential dangers and the need for effective detection methods. Deepfakes refer to manipulated or synthesized media content, such as images, videos, or audio recordings, that convincingly replicate real people saying or doing things they never did. While deepfakes can have legitimate applications in entertainment and creative fields, their malicious use poses serious threats to individuals, organizations, and society as a whole.

The dangers of deepfakes are not very heavily known by everyone, and this poses a threat. There is no guarantee that what you see online is real, and deepfakes have successfully lessened the gap between fake and real content. Even though the technology can be used for creating innovative entertainment projects, it is also being heavily misused by cybercriminals. Additionally, if the technology is not monitored properly by law enforcement, things will likely get out of hand quickly.

Deepfakes can be used to spread false information, which can have severe consequences for public opinion, political discourse, and trust in institutions. A realistic deepfake video of a public figure could be used to disseminate fabricated statements or actions, leading to confusion and the potential for societal unrest.

Cybercriminals can exploit deepfake technology for financial gain. By impersonating someone's voice or face, scammers could trick individuals into divulging sensitive information, making fraudulent transactions, or even manipulating people into thinking they are communicating with a trusted source.

Deepfakes have the potential to disrupt democratic processes by distorting the truth during elections or important political events. Fake videos of candidates making controversial statements could sway public opinion or incite conflict.

The Dangers of Deepfake Technology and How to Spot Them

[youtubemarketing1234]

This video is all about the dangers of deepfake technology. In short, deepfake technology is a type of AI that is able to generate realistic, fake images of people. This technology has the potential to be used for a wide variety of nefarious purposes, from porn to political manipulation.

Deepfake technology has emerged as a significant concern in the digital age, raising alarm about its potential dangers and the need for effective detection methods. Deepfakes refer to manipulated or synthesized media content, such as images, videos, or audio recordings, that convincingly replicate real people saying or doing things they never did. While deepfakes can have legitimate applications in entertainment and creative fields, their malicious use poses serious threats to individuals, organizations, and society as a whole.

The dangers of deepfakes are not very heavily known by everyone, and this poses a threat. There is no guarantee that what you see online is real, and deepfakes have successfully lessened the gap between fake and real content. Even though the technology can be used for creating innovative entertainment projects, it is also being heavily misused by cybercriminals. Additionally, if the technology is not monitored properly by law enforcement, things will likely get out of hand quickly.

Deepfakes can be used to spread false information, which can have severe consequences for public opinion, political discourse, and trust in institutions. A realistic deepfake video of a public figure could be used to disseminate fabricated statements or actions, leading to confusion and the potential for societal unrest.

Cybercriminals can exploit deepfake technology for financial gain. By impersonating someone's voice or face, scammers could trick individuals into divulging sensitive information, making fraudulent transactions, or even manipulating people into thinking they are communicating with a trusted source.

Deepfakes have the potential to disrupt democratic processes by distorting the truth during elections or important political events. Fake videos of candidates making controversial statements could sway public opinion or incite conflict.

The Dangers of Deepfake Technology and How to Spot Them

[jce93]

thry have the perfect sun/moon dynamic but u guys arent ready to hear that js yet 🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫

[gender-euphowrya]

like i get that recognizing AI pictures isn't always easy especially as the technology changes and 'fixes' what we usually consider telltales but some people don't even fucking try

and i cannot stress enough how badly you NEED to learn to do it

[ladyshinga]

I keep being told to "adapt" to this new AI world.

Okay.

Well first of all, I've been training myself more and more how to spot fake images. I've been reading every article with a more critical eye to see if it's full of ChatGPT's nonsense. I've been ignoring half the comments on stuff just assuming it's now mostly bots trying to make people angry enough to comment.

When it comes to the news and social issues, I've started to focus on and look for specific journalists and essayists whose work I trust. I've been working on getting better at double-checking and verifying things.

I have been working on the biggest part, and this one is a hurdle: PEOPLE. People whose names and faces I actually know. TALKING to people. Being USED to talking to people. Actual conversations with give and take that a chat bot can't emulate even if their creators insist they can.

All of this combined is helping me survive an AI-poisoned internet, because here's what's been on my mind:

What if the internet was this poisoned in 2020?

Would we have protested after George Floyd?

A HUGE number of people followed updates about it via places like Twitter and Tiktok. Twitter is now a bot-hell filled with nazis and owned by a petulant anti-facts weirdo, and Tiktok is embracing AI so hard that it gave up music so that its users can create deepfakes of each other.

Would information have traveled as well as it did? Now?

The answer is no. Half the people would have called the video of Floyd's death a deepfake, AI versions of it would be everywhere to sew doubt about the original, bots would be pushing hard for people to do nothing about it, half the articles written about it would be useless ChatGPT garbage, and the protests themselves… might just NOT have happened. Or at least, they'd be smaller - AND more dangerous when it comes to showing your face in a photo or video - because NOW what can people DO with that photo and video? The things I mentioned earlier will help going forward. Discernment. Studying how the images look, how the fake audio sounds, how the articles often talk in circles and litter in contradictory misinformation. and PEOPLE.

PEOPLE is the biggest one here, because if another 2020-level event happens where we want to be protesting on the streets by the thousands, our ONLY recourse right now is to actually connect with people. Carefully of course, it's still a protest, don't use Discord or something, they'll turn your chats over to cops.

But what USED to theoretically be "simple" when it came to leftist organizing ("well my tweet about it went viral, I helped!") is just going to require more WORK now, and actual personal communication and connection and community. I know if you're reading this and you're American, you barely know what that feels like and I get it. We're deprived of it very much on purpose, but the internet is becoming more and more hostile to humanity itself. When it comes to connecting to other humans… we now have to REALLY connect to other humans

I'm sorry. This all sucks. But adapting usually does.

[bananonbinary]

thinking again about the controversy about AI deepfakes and how that can easily create misinformation, and on some level, i feel like that's approaching the problem from the wrong direction. as xkcd said, we've had "text deepfakes" for thousands of years.

just. my last reblog was a gif of a dog digging a hole on the moon. it's very realistic; while i'm sure some sort of expert could "debunk" it, I, the layperson, can't see any obvious flaws in it. but i know it's fake, because i know the fact that dogs cannot dig holes on the moon. i don't *need* to have the technical know-how to spot the seams, i just need to be reasonably educated in the subject to know what is and isn't true.

and i know, i know, it's more complicated than that, obviously people can't be expected to be educated in every single topic that happens to come to their attention, but i still think the obvious solution has more to do with having clear, easily accessible information than being able to spot the "tells" of ai, which are likely to be ever changing as the technology evolves.

[mariacallous]

In early 2022, two Google policy staffers met with a trio of women victimized by a scam that resulted in explicit videos of them circulating online—including via Google search results. The women were among the hundreds of young adults who responded to ads seeking swimsuit models only to be coerced into performing in sex videos distributed by the website GirlsDoPorn. The site shut down in 2020, and a producer, a bookkeeper, and a cameraman subsequently pleaded guilty to sex trafficking, but the videos kept popping up on Google search faster than the women could request removals.

The women, joined by an attorney and a security expert, presented a bounty of ideas for how Google could keep the criminal and demeaning clips better hidden, according to five people who attended or were briefed on the virtual meeting. They wanted Google search to ban websites devoted to GirlsDoPorn and videos with its watermark. They suggested Google could borrow the 25-terabyte hard drive on which the women’s cybersecurity consultant, Charles DeBarber, had saved every GirlsDoPorn episode, take a mathematical fingerprint, or “hash,” of each clip, and block them from ever reappearing in search results.

The two Google staffers in the meeting hoped to use what they learned to win more resources from higher-ups. But the victim’s attorney, Brian Holm, left feeling dubious. The policy team was in “a tough spot” and “didn’t have authority to effect change within Google,” he says.

His gut reaction was right. Two years later, none of those ideas brought up in the meeting have been enacted, and the videos still come up in search.

WIRED has spoken with five former Google employees and 10 victims’ advocates who have been in communication with the company. They all say that they appreciate that because of recent changes Google has made, survivors of image-based sexual abuse such as the GirlsDoPorn scam can more easily and successfully remove unwanted search results. But they are frustrated that management at the search giant hasn’t approved proposals, such as the hard drive idea, which they believe will more fully restore and preserve the privacy of millions of victims around the world, most of them women.

The sources describe previously unreported internal deliberations, including Google’s rationale for not using an industry tool called StopNCII that shares information about nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) and the company’s failure to demand that porn websites verify consent to qualify for search traffic. Google’s own research team has published steps that tech companies can take against NCII, including using StopNCII.

The sources believe such efforts would better contain a problem that’s growing, in part through widening access to AI tools that create explicit deepfakes, including ones of GirlsDoPorn survivors. Overall reports to the UK’s Revenge Porn hotline more than doubled last year, to roughly 19,000, as did the number of cases involving synthetic content. Half of over 2,000 Brits in a recent survey worried about being victimized by deepfakes. The White House in May urged swifter action by lawmakers and industry to curb NCII overall. In June, Google joined seven other companies and nine organizations in announcing a working group to coordinate responses.

Right now, victims can demand prosecution of abusers or pursue legal claims against websites hosting content, but neither of those routes is guaranteed, and both can be costly due to legal fees. Getting Google to remove results can be the most practical tactic and serves the ultimate goal of keeping violative content out of the eyes of friends, hiring managers, potential landlords, or dates—who almost all likely turn to Google to look up people.

A Google spokesperson, who requested anonymity to avoid harassment from perpetrators, declined to comment on the call with GirlsDoPorn victims. She says combating what the company refers to as nonconsensual explicit imagery (NCEI) remains a priority and that Google’s actions go well beyond what is legally required. “Over the years, we’ve invested deeply in industry-leading policies and protections to help protect people affected by this harmful content,” she says. “Teams across Google continue to work diligently to bolster our safeguards and thoughtfully address emerging challenges to better protect people.”

In an interview with WIRED, a Google search product manager overseeing anti-harm work says blocking videos using hashes is challenging to adopt because some websites don’t publish videos in a way that search engines can compare against. Speaking on condition of anonymity, she says Google has encouraged explicit websites to address that. She adds that there’s generally more for Google to do but refutes the allegation that executives had held up the work.

Advocates of bolder action by Google point to the company’s much tighter restrictions on searching for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as evidence it could do much more. Typing “deepfake nudes kids” into Google prompts a warning that such content is illegal and ultimately directs users to news articles and support groups. Google also finds and blocks from its results almost 1 million new CSAM-containing webpages annually.

A recent Google search for “deepfake nudes jennifer aniston” yielded seven results purporting to offer just that. The search engine offered no warning or resources in response to the query, despite nearly every US state and many countries having criminalized unpermitted distribution of intimate content of adults. Google declined to comment on the lack of a warning.

The product manager says comparisons to CSAM are invalid. Virtually any image of a naked child is illegal and can be automatically removed, she says. Separating NCEI from consensual porn requires some indication that the content was shot or distributed without permission, and that context often isn’t clear until a victim files a report and a human analyzes it. But the manager wouldn’t directly answer whether Google has tried to overcome the challenge.

Adam Dodge, founder of advocacy and education group Ending Tech-Enabled Abuse, says that until Google proactively removes more NCII, victims have to be hypervigilant about finding and reporting it themselves. That’s “not something we should put on victims,” he says. “We’re asking them to go to the location where they were assaulted online to move past the trauma.”

Google started accepting removal requests for search results leading to nudity or sex in 2015 if the content was intended to be private and was never authorized to be published, according to its policy. That went largely unchanged until 2020, when the company added that being in an “intimate state” qualified.

A New York Times column that year triggered Google executives to dedicate resources to the issue, organizing projects, including one codenamed Sparrow, to help victims keep content off search for good, three former employees say. The product manager confirmed that executives at times have pushed teams to improve Google’s handling of NCEI.

Google made its takedown form friendlier to use, understand, and access, the sources say. The search giant axed legalese and outdated use of the term “revenge porn,” since porn is generally viewed as consensual. The company added instructions on submitting screenshots and greater detail on the review process.

The form became accessible by clicking the menu that appears next to every search result. Requests rose about 19-fold in one early test, one source says. A second source says that it has become among Google’s most-used forms for reporting abuse and that, after the edits, a far greater percentage of requests resulted in removal of results. Google disputes these figures, but it declined to share comprehensive data on NCEI.

Government-mandated transparency reports show Google has removed most of the nearly 170,000 search and YouTube links reported for unwanted sexual content in South Korea since December 2020, the earliest data available, and nixed nearly 300 pieces of content in response to 380 complaints from users in India since May 2021. The limited data suggest Google is finding more reports credible than its smaller rival in search Microsoft, which took action in 52 percent of the nearly 8,400 cases it received globally for Bing and other services from 2015 through June 2023.

Launched in late 2021, the StopNCII system has amassed a database of over 572,000 hashed photos and videos and blocked that media from being shared more than 12,000 times across 10 services, including Instagram and TikTok. Google hasn’t adopted the tool to block content from search due to concerns about what’s actually in the database, according to three sources.

To protect victims’ privacy, StopNCII doesn’t review content they report, and hashes reveal nothing about the underlying content. Google is worried that it could end up blocking something innocent, the sources say. “We don’t know if it’s just an image of a cupcake,” one of them says. The sources add that Google also has opted against bankrolling a system it considers better, despite internal suggestions to do so.

The Google spokesperson declined to comment on StopNCII, but in April the company told UK lawmakers who questioned Google about its decision not to use the tool that it had “specific policy and practical concerns about the interoperability of the database,” without elaborating.

Internally, Google workers have come up with some bold ideas to improve takedowns. Employees have discussed booting explicit websites, including porn companies, from search results unless they are willing to assure that their content is consensual, according to four sources. The idea hasn’t been adopted. Google’s search unit has shied away from setting rules on a thorny and taboo subject like sexual imagery, three sources say. “They don’t want to be seen as regulators of the internet,” one former staffer says.

Because Google sends significant traffic to explicit websites, it could force them to take stricter measures. About 15 percent of image searches and up to half of video searches among the billions Google receives daily are related to porn, says one former staffer, figures the company declined to comment on. “Google holds the keys to the kingdom,” the source says. Meanwhile, few others are stepping in. US lawmakers haven’t passed proposed legislation to impose consent checks on online uploads. And some popular services for sharing explicit content, such as Reddit and X, don’t require users to submit proof of subjects’ consent.

Porn producers, who collect identity information from performers as required by US law, support the sharing of a consent signal with search engines, says Mike Stabile, spokesperson for the industry trade body Free Speech Coalition. “Major adult sites already monitor and block NCII much more aggressively than mainstream platforms,” he says.

The Google spokesperson declined to comment on the consent idea but points to an existing penalty: Google last December began demoting—but not blocking—search results for websites that come up in “a high volume” of successful takedown requests.

The Google product manager and the spokesperson contend that the search team already has taken big steps over the past three years to ease the burden on survivors of image-based sexual abuse. But WIRED’s investigation shows that some improvements have come with caveats.

A system Google introduced that tries to automatically remove search links when previously reported content resurfaces on new websites doesn’t work on videos or altered images, and two sources say Google hadn’t dedicated staff to improving it. “It absolutely could be better, and there isn’t enough attention on how it could really solve victims’ problems,” one says. The spokesperson says staff are assigned to enhance the tool.

Another system called known victim protection tries to filter out results with explicit images from search queries similar to those from past takedown requests, the two sources say. It is designed to not disrupt results to legitimate porn and generally reduces the need for victims to stay vigilant for new uploads. But Google has acknowledged to South Korean regulators that the system isn’t perfect. “Given the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the web, automated systems are not able, 100 percent of the time, to catch every explicit result,” the company writes in its transparency reports.

In one of its biggest shifts, Google last August abandoned its policy of declining to remove links to content that included signs that it had been captured with consent. For years, if Google determined from the imagery and any audio that the subject knew they were being recorded without any signs of coercion or distress, it would reject the takedown ask unless the requester provided ample evidence that it had been published without consent. It was a “super-mushy concept,” one of the former employees says.

That same source says staff persuaded executives to update the policy in part by describing the importance of letting people who had become adult performers on OnlyFans out of financial necessity to later revoke their consent and shred any ties to sex work. The Google spokesperson didn’t dispute this.

The Washington, DC-based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an anti-porn group that’s become an authority on image-based sexual abuse, argues that even after the revision, Google is falling short. It wants Google to automatically honor all takedown requests and put the burden on websites to prove there was consent to record and publish the disputed content. The Google spokesperson says that potential policy updates are constantly considered.

In the eyes of advocates, Google is being nowhere near as resourceful or attentive as it could or should be. Brad Gilde of Gilde Law Firm in Houston says he came away disappointed when his client won a headline-grabbing $1.2 billion judgment against an ex-boyfriend last August but then couldn’t get Google to remove a highly ranked search link to a sexually explicit audio recording of her on YouTube. The upload, which included the victim’s name and drew over 100 views, came down last month only after WIRED inquired.

Developing a reliable AI system to proactively identify nonconsensual media may prove impossible. But better keeping an ear out for big cases shouldn’t be too complicated, says Dan Purcell, a victim who founded removal company Ceartas DMCA. Google employees had a proposal on this issue: The company could establish a priority flagger program—as it has for other types of problematic content, including CSAM—and formally solicit tips from outside organizations such as Purcell’s that monitor for NCII. But staffing to administer the idea never came through. “​​Google is the No. 1 discoverability platform,” Purcell says. “They have to take more responsibility.” The Google spokesperson declined to comment.

DeBarber, the removal consultant who spoke with Google alongside his clients victimized by GirlsDoPorn, did a search for one of them this month while on the phone with WIRED. No links surfaced to videos of her, because DeBarber has spent over 100 hours getting those pages removed. But one porn service was misusing her name to lure in viewers to other content—a new result DeBarber would have to ask Google to remove. And through a different Google search, he could access a problematic website on which people can look up videos of his client.

Harassers regularly text that client links to her NCII, a frustrating reminder of how her past has yet to be erased. “They want to be out of sight and out of mind,” DeBarber says of his clients. “We’re heading in the right direction.” But he and survivors are counting on Google to help knock out the offenders for good. "A lot more could have been done by Google and still could be."

[kaeyx]

how about… chuuya and… idol!reader…. but i dont want him sweet i want him to be nasty, creepy and desperate:3

Ehehehe yes creepy pervert parasocial men are my kryptonite (only in fantasy obviously we don't support fucking 4chan users on this blog).

Fan!Chuuya who owns all your merch, probably runs a massively successful stan/updates acc on twt, finds some way to go to all your concerts and always gets the best spots. Also goes to all your meets and gets you to sign everything, including some token like a playing card/picture of you he can keep on him at all times for good luck. You think he's just an overinvested fan, you have plenty of those, but it gets worse.

With all the money and power he has it's easy for him to find out your address, your phone number, probably pays off some of your team to leak your schedule so he can either observe you from afar or "bump into you". He pays people to make edits and rigs and deepfakes of you and compiles them into his own personal porn stash. Pays your manager to get one on one meets with you so he can pretend you're on a date. Probably invests massively in your parent company to have more sway over you.

[jealousmartini]

can you please explain the whole nth room thing? i keep seeing people say different things like how it’s only 20 idols and not 200 or how the list isn’t getting revealed anytime soon while others say it’s getting revealed tomorrow. please help me, i’m so lost😭

From what I have learnt, the news about Taeil is 100% true since the SM company made a short post about Taeil being kicked out of NCT for unconfirmed sexual abuse on a fan for 6 years and it started when she was 12

The Nth room situation is basically a chat room with 260,000 accounts that have been making and sharing AI deepfake p0rnography of females (idols, teachers, literally children, family members) to each other on Telegram that some women found just recently. And I am just as confused on the number of idols there were found in the chatroom too, wether theres 10-20 or 200 of them i have no clue and i havent seen any official sources confirming the number myself, but there is definitely some idols in there according to the women.

That's all the information I know of this situation, if I have learnt something wrong the anyone has spotted PLEASE REBLOG THIS WITH THE CORRECT INFO!!! WE CANNOT RISK MISINFORMATION BEING SPREAD🙏🏾🙏🏾

EDIT:: I'm seeing a lot of people saying there will be NO LIST BEING DROPPED! THIS PROBABLY A RUMOUR MADE BY K-NETIZENS THAT THERE WAS A LIST IN THE FIRST PLACE

[imthefkgsupreme]

Can we talk about how messy this AI Instigator thing is?

I feel like there's a somewhat clear timeline of events:

First, obviously, Kimo tells Tucker about Quinn's power.

Tucker then turns on Quinn because he doesn't trust him anymore and calls him out in front of the house, thus starting their feud.

Quinn uses his power to put Tucker on the block and then put Rubina on the block as a replacement nominee despite being her friend and having a final 2 with her

Rubina and Quinn aren't as close anymore

The vote flips to save Rubina and then Tucker wins HOH

Tucker puts Quinn on the block and is annoyed that Rubina is back to being buddy-buddy with him despite the fact that he literally put her on the block

Tucker uses the veto on Quinn to put up Chelsie.

Quinn and Rubina become friends again

Tucker tries to deny the showmance allegations by telling MJ and Leah that Rubina is like a sister to him. They've both been following him around ever since he won the HOH

MJ and Leah notice Rubina coming to bed really late and maybe not coming to bed at all and instead sleeping in the HOH room

Quinn, Rubina and Tucker hang out near the aquarium and Quinn makes Rubina laugh. Tucker kinda seems annoyed

Tucker and Rubina then share a blanket and hold hands underneath. They were also holding hands in the hammock earlier but detached when Quinn walked by I think?

They're spotted by Quinn and Leah

Quinn tells Kimo and T'Kor.

Kimo then asks Tucker and Rubina about it. They don't exactly deny it

Leah tells Brooklyn and Joseph (I think?)

She also tells Joseph about the open box of condoms in Tucker's HOH room

Tucker becomes the AI Instigator

The AI Instigator uses a deepfake of Quinn to say that he spotted Tucker and Rubina holding hands under a blanket and that they should have gotten Rubina out of the house because Tucker wouldn't be able to handle it mentally without her

Rubina LOSES it. Level 3 crash out, she's sobbing about her showmance being exposed and the AI saying that she should have been evicted

Tucker tries to comfort her and tells her that at least now it's in the open and they can just hold hands publicly

TLDR: Tucker was kind of jealous of Quinn and wanted to go public with his showmance so he went about it in the stupidest way possible

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Lost Cause prologue, Part V

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

In my upcoming solarpunk novel The Lost Cause (Nov 14), we get an epic struggle between the people doing the repair and care work needed to save our planet and species, and the reactionary wreckers who want to kill the Green New Deal and watch the world burn:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks, which means that I make my own indie editions and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, along with ebooks and hardcovers. I narrated this one! It came out great! You can back it here:

http://lost-cause.org

This week, I've been serializing the prologue to give you a taste of what you can expect from the book, which Bill McKibben calls "politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/06/green-new-deal-fic/#the-first-generation-in-a-century-not-to-fear-the-future

And part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/07/met-cute-ugly/#part-ii

And part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#lost-cause-prologue

And part four:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#super-soaker-full-of-hydrochloric-acid

And now, part five:

Look, I had weeks to go until graduation. I had a life to live. I had stuff to do.

Gramps and his friends would stew and shout. Idiots on the internet would make dank memes out of Mike Kennedy and deepfake him into a million videos, turn him into a main character whose image would be around long after he left the world.

I just had to keep my head down, collect my diploma, and get the hell out of Burbank. I’d already been provisionally accepted for a Blue Helmets AmeriCorps spot down in San Juan Capistrano, helping to rebuild the city’s lower half a mile inland, up in the hills. I was going to do a year of that and then go to college: I had applications in to UCLA, Portland State (they had a really good refugee tech undergrad program), and the University of Waterloo, where my mom did her undergrad in environmental science. They’d let me declare my major in my second year, so I could take a wide variety of courses before settling on something, and if anything, Canada’s free college was even more generous than the UC system or Portland’s, with a subsidy for dorms and meals.

To tell the truth, I’d be glad to go. My senior year hadn’t been anything like I’d anticipated. Gramps’s health had gotten a lot worse the previous summer and his shitty sexist and racist remarks chased away any home help worker Burbank sent over within a week or two, so I’d been trying to keep my grades up while picking up after Gramps, getting him to take his meds, washing his sheets and cleaning his toilet—­not to mention making sure he made his doctor’s appointments and even bringing him into the office a couple of times a month for the kind of exams you couldn’t do by telemedicine.

I wasn’t sure what Gramps would do without me to take care of him, but at that point, I was running out of fucks to give. Let his asshole Maga Club buddies look after him, or maybe Gramps could figure out how not to offend everyone that came over to wipe his ass and do his laundry. He was—­as he was fond of pointing out to me—­a grown-­ass adult, and this was his house, and he was in charge. So let him be in charge.

I put myself to bed stewing about all of this, thinking of San Juan Capistrano. Some of my older friends had graduated the previous years and had gone down there and I’d followed their relocation of the old mission on their feeds. It looked like hot, sweaty, rewarding work, the kind of thing where you could really measure your progress.

For the second night in a row, I was woken up at 2 a.m. This time, it wasn’t my screen, it was Gramps, who’d stumped into my room with his cane, flipped my lights to full on, and started shaking me and calling out, “Get up, kid, get up!”

“I’m up,” I said, getting up on my elbows and squinting at him.

He was shaking, and he reeked—­of both booze and BO, and I felt a flash of guilt for not getting him in the bath that day.

“God dammit,” he said, and staggered a bit. I leapt out of bed, pulling the sheets off with me, and steadied him at the elbow.

“Calm down, okay? What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right. No one is all right. Fuck all right and fuck you.” I’d had Gramps tested for early dementia the previous year, by showing his doctor videos of moments like these. The doc had run a battery of tests before pronouncing, “Your grandfather isn’t senile, he’s just ornery.” Which was undeniable, and also pissed me the hell off. “Ornery” was a polite word for “asshole.” What the doc was telling me was that Gramps didn’t have to be cruel. He was cruel by choice.

I untangled myself from the sheets and piled them on the bed.

“What is it?”

“It’s Mike Kennedy, that asshole. Someone shot him.”

“What?”

He shoved his giant screen into my hands. I tapped the video window. It was from the POV of a car cam, that weird fish-­eye view of a self-­driving car, split-­screen with the passenger in the front seat, and it was Mike Kennedy, looking even worse than Gramps, bloodshot and trembling, with that under-­chin camera angle that makes everyone look like they’re half dead.

I tried to watch both halves. There was Kennedy, whispering something to him. There was the cul-­de-­sac he was parked in, false-­lit with IR from the cameras. The timestamp was 1:17. Less than an hour before.

Then the external image flickered for a second and resolved itself into a man, who phased in and out. He was wearing a ghillie suit like the one Kennedy had worn on the roof, covered in telltale CV dazzle stripes, designed to exploit defects in the computer vision system. You had to wear a different specific pattern for every algorithm, but if you got the right matchup, the computer would simply not see you. The man was flickering into existence when his posture crumpled up the ghillie suit and made the pattern stop working, then out again when he straightened up.

He straightened and disappeared and Mike Kennedy’s eyes widened as he noticed the man for the first time—­computer dazzle worked on computers, not humans—­and he started to say something and then a round hole appeared in his forehead, his head snapping back against the headrest, then careening forward. The flickering phantom appeared again as the man in the ghillie suit turned and disappeared.

I dropped the tablet to my bed.

“Jesus Christ, Gramps, I didn’t need to see that snuff movie—­”

He tried to smack me then. I was ready for it. I was faster. I stepped out of his reach. I was shaking too.

“You don’t get to hit me anymore old man. Never again, you hear me?”

He was purpling now, and a decade’s worth of fleeing and defusing his rages rose in me, made me want to apologize. After all, I rationalized, he’d just seen a friend murdered.

But I’d seen that friend murdered too, videobombed with a snuff flick at 2 a.m. without warning or consent. It was a traumatizing, selfish, asshole move. I’d be watching that movie on the backs of my eyelids for years to come. And the friend who’d died? He’d been ready to kill me. Gramps had no right. He was a grown-­ass adult. He had no right.

“Listen to me, you little shit, you think you can live under my roof, take my charity, and talk to me like that? Now? With all the shit that I’m going through? No sir. No. Get out, you little bastard, get out now. Get out before I kick your goddamned teeth in.” He was vibrating with rage now, literally, actually shaking so hard his wispy hair swished back and forth across his forehead.

I didn’t say another word. I picked up some jeans and a jacket, put a pair of socks in a jacket pocket, and jammed my feet into a pair of sneakers without bothering to unlace them. I shouldered past him—­still vibrating, stinking even worse—­and banged out the back door and stomped through the nighttime streets.

My feet automatically took me up to Verdugo, and then across the empty road. I turned toward school—­as I did every morning—­and autopiloted in that direction. By the time I reached the Verdugo Aquatic Facility I had calmed down enough to realize that there was no reason to go to school at two thirty in the morning, so I stopped and headed for the playground in the park behind the pool. I sat down on a bench and kicked my shoes off and shook out the playground sand, pulled out my socks and put them on, then put my shoes back on properly. I was still furious, but now I could think straight and my hands weren’t shaking. Gramps and I hadn’t had a blowup like that in years, mostly—­ okay, entirely—­because I’d backed down every time we’d been headed in that direction. I wasn’t in any mood to back down. Not ever, to be fully honest.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#part-v

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[theashemarie]

I have two oneshot ideas duking it out in my head rn, so help me out. (See below the poll/cut for more information.)

Everyone Knows AU:

Things changed slowly at first. Donnie’s scrubber caught every photo posted online, every smudge of green, every flash of yellow that could even remotely be April, every small, Splinter-sized gray blob, but it couldn’t reach the ones that were never posted. Donnie tried, but it was a Polaroid that did them in. Blurry, but still distinct enough, digitized on a computer that wasn’t connected to the internet, cleaned up, and clear as smog. Four green mutants, one huge, one small, two somewhere in the middle. Red, orange, purple, blue spots of color. Two rounded backs, one spiky, one blocky, all solid. Inhuman. “Seems like someone is trying really hard to cover this up,” the quote that accompanied the photo said, blared across the Channel 6 news, then the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Times, then every publication, every YouTube channel worth mentioning, every social media site, translated over and over again until everyone with internet access had seen the green frogs, turtles, deepfaked, ninjas, mutants, freaks, samurai, wizards, aliens, government coverup, heroes—

Post-movie. A world where everyone knows, and the first step to testing the waters is a midnight showing at a run-down movie theater.

Quadruplets:

“You ever think about how we’re basically quadruplets?” Leo asked, nonchalant. “Of course I have,” Donnie answered without looking up from his phone. “Don’t ever mention it to Raph though. You’ll give him a complex.”

Or:

Draxum had to begrudgingly admit that Splinter had done a good job raising them. If raising his four genetically-engineered killing machines to be kind, golden-hearted, and good was a good job.

Post-Season 2. Confronting the occasion and process of your creation head-on.

[gggoldfinch]

what are your thoughts on romulus in general? and specifically on the alien baby

HOHHHHH BOY IM SO GLAD YOU ASKED because i am THE avp universe junkie around these parts and this movie CHANGED ME AS A PERSON!!!!!!!!! i screamed my whole way home from the imax theater. I’ll put my scatterbrained thoughts under the cut so anyone who wants to avoid spoilers can!

First off: it’s immediately top 3 Alien franchise movies for me. Alien, Aliens, Romulus; That’s my new top 3 list. I like the story of Rom more than Aliens but I’m more attached to the characters in Aliens than Rom so in that way they’re kinda tied for my #2 spot.

Honestly I thought it was the best sci-fi and/or horror that’s come out in fucking eons!!! I was thoroughly on edge throughout the runtime and even got genuinely scared a few times. I spent the whole movie with my hand over my mouth in shock, no joke. The suspense KILLED ME!!!!!!!! The build up to each event was just phenomenal and just when you thought it was about to get better for the characters NOPE! I went into it completely blind, no notion of the plot whatsoever, and was SO thoroughly pleased with the outcome.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE SET DESIGN AND PRACTICAL EFFECTS???? Such a breath of fresh air after TOO MANY movies lately have been relying solely on cgi, including the most recent installments in the Alien franchise. It’s so nice to watch a character react to a thing that’s actually physically right next to them. And all the scenes of the space station reminded me of Alien Isolation, which I really enjoyed. It truly brought the game to life and with it that grand, expansive, yet claustrophobically contained sense of dread that comes with being stranded on a Weyland-Yutani space station. It looked SO convincing. And of course I’m just forever in love with the retrofuture 70’s aesthetic of the franchise and am so glad they keep up with it (almost) every time

I was also delighted we got to see the inclusion of an on-world setting. The mining colony scene in the beginning was really what sold me that the movie was about to be fantastic

HR Giger would have been proud of all the gross imagery. Truly. During the wall womb thing scene I leaned over to my best friend and went “that’s a PUSSY bro” because I mean DID YOU SEE IT. Rom really returned to its roots, it reminded me SO MUCH of the original in its overall vibe.

The one single thing I did not like was the zombie ai deepfake of Ian Holm (who has been dead since 2020 if you didn’t know). That was a little uhhhh ummm yikes. Not to mention the cgi on “him” was ROUGH at times. I get the idea of using a time period relevant synthetic (since from what I understand Rom takes place less than a year after the events of Alien, given the whole Nostromo salvage arc) but they could have easily cast someone new as a different model, or even brought in Michael Fassbender as an “older” model. Canonically Lance Henriksen (who would have to be de-aged up the wazoo) being brought in as a Bishop model wouldn’t have made sense (since Bishop’s model was manufactured shortly before Aliens, according to the Xenopedia) but I mean hey. they retcon canon all the time who cares lol. However as a diehard I do get how his model was canonically relevant to the time period and scenario, so I understand the thought process tbqf. The execution was just… questionable.

I’ve seen a lot of people with braindead takes that the references and callbacks to the original movies fell flat or were unnecessary, but I thought they were very well placed and tied the stories together wonderfully. Who could hate a “get away from her you BITCH” line?????? Clearly these people aren’t diehards LOL because everyone in my theater LOVED that

I loved Rain and Andy SO MUCH. They were so sweet, and I love the concept of treating synths like real people/ family members (i’m a sucker and am Blade Runner brainrotted). They were the only characters I really felt anything for, other than Kay as her story progressed. The others felt a little one-dimensional, but admittedly there really wasn’t a lot of opportunity to flesh any of them out that much. I am of course a sucker for sweet synths and Andy’s character reminded me of Bishop in a lot of ways, which I think may have been intentional in some aspects (i.e. his desire to be referred to as an artificial person). I won’t really go into analyzing the characters since I don’t really care enough about them to do so (I was more into this movie for the story, unlike some others in the franchise), but I did enjoy a couple of them so that’s good enough for me.

My best friend asked me whose death was my favorite and honestly it was probably Tyler’s— a truly classic way to go out in an Alien movie (I gasped when the other xenos were revealed during that scene). I also made the point to him that the chestburster that came out of Navarro came out of her upper chest region rather than lower down by the bottom of her ribcage (which is traditionally where they come out of, based off the original writer’s intention for it to represent the pain of a Crohn’s disease flare (which I can attest to)), so I’m hypothesizing that they removed the facehugger before it was finished implanting the embryo and it grew in her esophagus rather than her stomach. Yes? Yes. Brutal!

AND THE OFFSPRING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When I tell you my entire crowded theater bristled and gasped in sheer unadulterated HORROR! I think I was the first one out of 50 people to audibly go “oh god no” then like 15 others followed LMFAO it was a group trauma experience for all of us; my best friend looked like he was going to fucking sob. I was anticipating something with how Kay’s story progressed, but I did not fucking expect THAT. I thought it was gonna be something with her after that shot of the rat mutating, not her baby. My first thought (after recoiling in horror) was how it fucking LOOKED LIKE AN ENGINEER!!!!! Consider: the engineers made humans in their image, therefore logically evolved humans would begin to look like the engineers. Perhaps if the method had been perfected the offspring would have looked more engineer and less… xenomorph-human-engineer-bastard-spawn from the deepest pit of hell. Horrific. I FUCKING LOVED IT AND I WAS LITERALLY PETRIFIED. It was a nice tie in with all the wacky shit we saw in Prom/Cov. I also thought it was somewhat of parallel with Alien Resurrection too, even how the thing looked a little bit.

All in all, I personally would give it a 5/5 stars. I’m going to see it again sometime this week. I fucking LOVE this franchise.

[eruhamster]

i feel like our government has been actively hostile for so long that when your average person under the age of like, 40, talks about politics ans how we need to vote for democrats, the idea of the government meaningfully making their lives better straight up does not occur to them. it's always just about how evil the other guy is. and this isn't even -just- about biden. i do not think i've seen or heard anyone talk of a single politician in a way that implies they think they would be a good leader and make american lives better to any degree. even congressional campaign promises and support start and stop at 'theyll stop the republican menace.'

there's so many little things in our lives that protect us due to little laws that used to be passed often, back when our government ever did anything at all beside bomb people. that's grinded to a complete stop. think about your life, and all the small things that get under your skin. the ever-growing trucks who can't fit in parking spots without either blocking half the sidewalk or jutting out into the street. increasing amounts of light pollution. scams getting so bad that they're now mailed to you directly with return addresses. things like that; this stuff used to have politicians act on them. laws used to be put in place for when these problems cropped up. that's the point of our government. the only recent example I can think of is deepfake porn - and that's only chased after because rich celebrities are the ones being targeted.

it's so deeply sad to think about. and I think people don't really grapple with the full nature of what this means. our government has not been working for a very long time; voting democrat is not going to save it. you can get upset and say it's about fighting fascism, but the reality is that this is never going to get better. the government will not suddenly start working again. we are in a pit from which we cannot arise. we've already consumed the poison and let it fester in our stomach. we've teetered too far on the edge of a drain - we're just going to fall. we can discuss the logistics of that fall, we can talk about what will make that fall nicest, so we don't hit our heads on the way down, but there is no "not falling" option. i feel like not enough people have truly realized that yet, only because they don't remember what a working government is actually supposed to be like.

[elephant-in-the-pride-parade]

I saw my first AI "fic" today.

The user who posted the AI creation added "goes to show we still need writers" I took that to mean they were uploading it to show how bad the AI creation was. Due to that, I felt more okay opening it for investigatory purposes (I made a post a while ago saying that AI would produce a facimile of creativity and I was curious how correct that would prove to be).

In a word, I was extremely correct. The fic had no-to minimal scene intros or transitions, banal dialogue, characters flat enough to feel ooc, silly to non existent conflicts, and it "tells" everything (no showing, no extended metaphors or insightful similes).

Scarily though, each snippet was coherent. Like sure, the characters were flat and the conflicts (when they exist) one dimensional and the turns of phrase often felt cliche (which is exactly what one would expect to get from an AI, which formulates sentences based off of how often words go next to eachother). But the scenes themselves make sense. If AI wasnt in the title I wouldnt have been able to tell the difference between this and a 15 yo's first fic.

The danger of course is that this is how AI starts out. The more people use them, and input content into them they will get better at producing this facimile of a creative work. AI could probably learn to produce some or all of the common components of storytelling that I've noticed this and other AI products lack.The scarier danger for me is when it becomes good enough to justify publishing houses and studios attempting to replace expensive human writers. (And to a degree clogging up AO3... although I hope enough people in fandom are here for the human connections that that wouldnt be a concern...).

Look, AI will never be keeping human writers out of fandom. Theres no finite number of spots on AO3. But AI could keep human writers out of screenwriting and book writing (which do have finite spots/finite funds for written works) and then... we lose something beautiful and precious.

The beauty of human writers is that they constantly have new things to say because every lived experience is so unique and precious. no two people will write a character's emotions the same way or capture the tension of a plot with the same words. I have read and will keep reading thousands of fanfics about the same canon characters because each person captures their pain and love and failures and triumphs in new and exciting ways. Humans always bring something new to the table. Humans always keep learning. Experimenting. Changing the conversation. An AI will never be able to say anything new. They are actively doing the opposite of human thinking and creating. Theyre not doing research or looking up new words or playing with new turns of phrase. Instead theyre cycling through a fixed set of applicable word choices and chosing the one with the highest percent match for what should come after the previous word.

So three bad things happen if you all start using AI as a fic production shortcut:

The AI improves its deepfakes of creativity. your requests, inputted content, and feedback all help it update the word selection math it is doing in the background. This makes it more likely that canon content stops being created by real people and instead starts being replwced by AI products.

You learn and feel nothing. I mean it. Writing is a joy because every creation is a new research rabbit hole. a new word looked up in the thesaurus. a new way to make your readers sob from the feels. AI robs you of that process. So you think less. You explore characters less. You are deprived the joy of marinating in your blorbos angst and pain and love and joy while you decide exactly how to put that into words. Youre deprived the satisfaction of your own work. (And by being deprived of the process above you also dont learn how to write. because the AI is not writing.)

Your readers lose out. Sure the AI has produced something perfectly spelled and grammared... but nothing new has been said. The grand conversation we are constantly having by writing and reading fic and exclaiming about characters stagnates and then festers. No new stories get told. AI is only producing things that look like what came before. your readers dont get any joy from new thoughts. new ideas. changed minds. changed perspectives... none of that happens. (Again I want to go back to point one. Im not worried about AO3 drowning in AI fics as much as I am worried that canon content will become overrun with it).

[devils-sacrament-catering]

Can you spot a deepfake because I barely can

https://careerswithstem.com.au/deep-fake-quiz/#gsc.tab=0