The Silencing of Charlie Kirk, and what this means for Social Media

The term "cancelled" has, in recent years, been taken to mean the same thing as being deplatformed, or demonetized. To remove someone's ability to reach larger audiences. To have someone fired from their jobs.

It took on new horrifying meaning this week when Charlie Kirk was murdered by an assassin's bullet in the middle of a public appearance at Utah Valley University in the USA. Kirk was a Right-wing activist who espoused ideals such as Pro-life, the Right to Bear Arms (the irony, huh?) and other typical Right-wing talking points.

Shot through
the neck.

I recognized Kirk from the news, because this guy had occasionally shown up on my YouTube feed, debating some hopelessly outmatched student or other. I never lingered overlong on those clips, simply because they just weren't very interesting. To be fair, it wasn't him, it was me. On YouTube, I have a below-average attention span unless it's tech-related.

Which in turn, begs the question: why am I even talking about this? The death of a Right-wing activist, while significant on a human level, is hardly a tech matter. On the other hand, I have spoken before about the bizarre Left-versus-Right culture wars in the USA, and the way it's played out on Social Media. I have talked before about how troubling our online discourse has become, even as I acknowledge that it's nowhere as frightening as that of the USA. And human matters are relevant in tech. Who do you think uses tech, robots?

In truth, when I wrote about the Culture Wars two months back, I was really hoping this would be the last time, at least for a bit. No such luck; the death of Charlie Kirk is pretty compelling stuff.

About Charlie Kirk

This entire episode was a tragedy, though not specifically because it was Charlie Kirk who died. According to some of the eulogies I've seen online, Kirk was quite the guy among his peers; and on the other side of the political aisle, a racist, misogynist, fascist and transphobe, among other fancy labels.

You know, I don't think any of that matters. Good guy or bad guy, Charles James Kirk was at least someone's son, someone's husband, and someone's dad. Two kids will grow up not knowing what their father was like except through those lame-ass YouTube videos and online articles, both gushing and brutal. I'm not going to sit here and act like Kirk and I were best pals or I was his biggest fan. The truth is, to me, he was just some rando on the internet whose opinions I sometimes agreed with and sometimes didn't. And he could come off as smug and condescending.

The thing is, being smug and condescending isn't grounds for public execution. Remember, Charlie Kirk was an activist who apparently ran his mouth a lot. And like most of the human race, sometimes he was prone to saying stupid shit. That's not a crime. It wasn't like he was a child molester or a serial killer. Or a Justin Bieber fan. If having an opinion and being a dick about it was reason enough for death, I know of more than a few people who should be joining Kirk in his six-foot grave. And yes, I include myself in that assessment.

If you've ever said stupid
shit, jump in here.

I've seen people use Kirk's position on the Second Amendment as justification to celebrate his death.

I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

Those voices are saying that Kirk made the above abhorrent statement, and as a result we shouldn't feel too bad about him dying from a bullet to the neck. Our own Professor Donald Low literally said "Karma's a bitch" on his Facebook post. 

To be honest, that's probably one of the stupidest excuses ever. Look, you can feel morally superior to Kirk if you want. But you can't declare yourself morally superior to him and then in the same breath lower yourself to his level to justify his death. This defies all logic. Stuff like this only reinforces my deeply-held belief that Social Media is full of raving idiots acting all intellectual.

Cancel Culture

People are shocked. Goodness knows why. Maybe people are shocked because Kirk wasn't holding the front line in Ukraine, where getting shot is kind of expected. He was at an educational institute in peacetime. In one moment, Charlie Kirk went from passionate public orator to bloodied corpse. That's probably the most extreme form of Cancel Culture. After all, you can't get any more cancelled than dead, can you?

In the grand scheme of things, though, was this really that unexpected? I would argue that the shooting was merely the latest in a long time of steadily escalating aggression towards people who espouse unpopular views. Except that before this, instead of simply ending their lives, we were content with merely ruining theirs.

Anyone who's ever tried to get someone else cancelled. Fired. Doxxed. Called the cops on them. All because they said something we didn't like. Anyone who's ever engaged in behavior like this, or even just cheered while it happened, has contributed in some small way to the state of affairs today. Because all that provided the stepping stones of acceptable behavior.

Hello, Police? Someone hurt
my feelings on Facebook.

Come on, we had to expect that eventually, the approval of ruining someone's life or doling out of physical violence would lead to this. It was always par for the course. Once you say that it's OK to ruin someone's life because they said something you considered offensive, you make room for that next escalation.

Singapore herself isn't entirely immune to violence of this sort, though thankfully so far none of it has been fatal. Do people still remember Amos Yee? He ran his mouth a whole bunch, and famously got slapped by an outraged citizen. Kirsten Han, an outspoken activist for a whole hosts of causes I can't begin to keep track of, got death threats.

I personally consider Amos Yee a loud and annoying housefly, and Kirsten Han a bit of a wanker, but I condone neither the violence nor the threats. I can't. I like to talk shit on the internet, and don't particularly want to be shot by some putz with a gun. Not that I think I'm next in line. Plenty of people far more famous than me. If you're going to shoot someone at all, you might as well go big, eh? Still, the principle stands. All of us should be able to say what we want to say without the threat of violence hanging over our heads.

Speaking of Cancel Culture, I've seen posts online celebrating the death of Kirk, followed by threats from others to report these posts and have these users outed and punished. Just a lot of ugliness all round.  Has the USA finally stopped pretending that they give a damn about Freedom of Speech?

What's next?

Earlier, I said that this was a tragedy, and now I'm about to elaborate on why. It's not simply that Charlie Kirk was killed. Let's be real, people die every day. This isn't more or less tragic just because it's Kirk who bought the farm.

However, this particular death has stoked what looks like a new escalation in the Culture Wars. It's now no longer just being fought on Social Media. People on the Right are riled up over the murder of one of their own, and people on the Left are afraid of some nutter retaliating. 

What if this was always the plan?

Donald Trump declared Leftist extremists to be responsible for Kirk's death. But this wasn't some pissed off nutjob losing his temper and simply letting loose with a gun. This looked like a carefully planned op with a sniper.

This was planned.

Kirk has been silenced, but perhaps that wasn't the main objective. Perhaps the entire point was to stoke a Civil War. Who really wins in this scenario?

Come on, pretty sure I'm not the only one thinking this. Anyone who isn't dramatically raising their fist to the sky and declaring we will not be silenced or explaining why the world is a better place without Charlie Kirk, watching all this from a distance, is wondering if there's some other motive behind this. If you're not thinking this, you're probably too close to the action. Or you simply belong in a less complicated, less nuanced world.

On the other hand, regardless of the actual motivation behind the killing, one thing remains unchanged. Kirk's murder has opened the floodgates to what was previously unthinkable.

Public discourse is no longer safe. The perception is that Kirk was murdered for his views. This should make anyone with an opinion that they have ever shared, exceedingly nervous. Especially if that opinion was unpopular and exists somewhere on the internet.

In a world filled with AI and deepfakes, where misinformation is more readily available than information, the danger grows exponentially. Imagine a world where one can be killed for airing an unpopular opinion, and where people could be tricked into believing one aired an unpopular opinion. Do the math. The conclusions are chilling.

Finally...

People say America is the Land of the Free, and constantly compare Singapore's perceived lack of freedoms against the USA's. Land of the Free? Free what, exactly? Free Charlie Kirk's soul from his mortal shell?

I'm glad I live in Singapore. Our forefathers realized early on that with excessive freedom, we would either rise to great heights or sink to our basest instincts. As a young nation with no natural resources, no land and not that much manpower, we simply could not afford the risk. Thus, our laws are strict, and as a result, what happened to Charlie Kirk is unlikely to happen here.

If this is the result of America's much vaunted freedoms, she can keep it.

Talk about a loaded situation!
T___T

A Tech Professional's Takeaways From Coldplaygate

Everyone's probably heard of Coldplaygate by now; certainly it seems like everyone's talking about it. The scandal involves tech company Astronomer, and its then-CEO Andrew Byron and HR Kristin Cabot. While it does qualify as a tech story in the sense that Astronomer is a DataOps tech company, I've put off talking about it up to now.

Why? Because, well, there were just other, more compelling things to talk about. I mean, the scandal essentially revolves around two high-ranking colleagues Byron and Cabot having an extramarital affair. It's basically two people at the workplace getting into trouble because they couldn't keep it in their pants. Nothing terribly new or original about that, is there?

What happened was that on the 16th of July at a Coldplay concert, frontman Chris Martin was shouting out concert-goers that the Kiss Cam picked up. And the Kiss Cam just happened to fall upon Byron and Cabot in the audience.

It would have been less awkward if the two of them had been in a chest-to-chest bro hug. No such luck; they were in full-on Titanic pose. Byron could have claimed he was giving Cabot the Heimlich, except his hands were entirely too high up, doing his best imitation of a Victoria's Secret underwire product, for that to be a feasible excuse.

The two of them scattered like Flat-earthers confronted with facts, and within twenty-four hours, the Internet identified the two of them as colleagues who were married... to other people.

All in all, a shitshow for Astronomer.

My takeaways to this entire thing aren't moral. Everyone seems to already be on that dog-pile, and there's no real value in me joining in. Also, I'd like to keep this about tech, or at least about the professional space.

Decision-making

Sure, obviously, the entire thing is unprofessional AF. And also kind of dumb.

Cheating on your spouses is one thing; doing it in a packed and very public stadium and expecting nothing to go wrong, is both stupid and reckless. Not exactly the kind of decision-making that inspires confidence in a Board of Directors.

Decisions, decisions.

I'd expect the CEO of a company, whose decisions affect the livelihoods of employees of said company, to make better decisions. Then again, I'm just a software dev, what the hell do I know about decision-making, right? Well, for one, I wouldn't make the decision to put myself in a position where I could be caught live on camera using my hands to keep my sidechick's mammary glands warm.

The faked apology

Soon after the incident, there was an apology posted by a troll account, pictured below. It appeared to be a post from Andy Byron addressing the events of Coldplaygate.

This fooled many people.

This was debunked fairly quickly, but apparently a lot of people were convinced it was real, and it spread like wildfire. Andy Byron was being roundly mocked for being both tone-deaf and an idiot. Unfairly, in this case.

But here's the question: why did it seem so real?

The reason, dear readers, is disheartening. Too many people in positions of authority, when called out for behaving badly, post insincere-sounding apologies like this one. Usually along the lines of "this is not who I want to be" and "I am a work in progress", and even the shade thrown at Coldplay at the end did not appear out of character simply because it happens so often. That level of entitlement is all too real, even if the post wasn't.

The simulation was, if anything, too on-the-nose. There was no AI and deepfake involved in this deception; the troll account wasn't even trying that hard. This is deeply concerning.

LinkedIn Profiles

On Kirstin Cabot's now-inactive LinkedIn account, she described herself as "a passionate people leader known for building award-winning cultures from the ground up for fast-growing startups and multinational corporations. An influential leader and fearless change-agent, I lead by example and win trust with employees of all levels, from CEOs to managers to assistants."

Just reading that made me throw up a little in my mouth. If you want your LinkedIn profile to sound as cringe as possible, you could do worse than take notes from this one.

Word salad.

Can someone say "word salad"? What is the term "fearless change-agent" even supposed to mean to anyone? What's even more disturbing is, this is supposed to be a HR professional. Is this the kind of garbage that impresses HR? Or is it just some kind of SEO for AI-powered recruitment? Either way, if this is the new normal for both job-seekers and hirers, we are so screwed.

Much of the sniggering has been about how someone with such a self-aggrandizing LinkedIn profile could turn out this way, but honestly, I've never held such profiles in high regard. If you're someone that would be impressed by fancy words on a LinkedIn profile that a thesaurus could vomit out, that's on you.

Conclusion

I wouldn't be too hard on Andy Byron. Not everyone can handle being in a position of power. Tends to go to ones head, you know? Both of them, in some cases. Heh heh.

Also, Kristin Cabot. Sure, call her a skank, homewrecker, whatever. But her being HR aside, what's she really done that's so different from every other woman who ever cosied up to the Boss?

Looks like they got (cold)played,
T___T

How much of the Artificial Intelligence hype is just hot air?

During an event held by Oracle in Singapore last month, I heard a speaker describe AI as "aspirin looking for a headache". On the other hand, Linus Torvalds was rather less poetic as he described AI, with characteristic bluntness, as "90% marketing and 10% reality".

The term "Artificial Intelligence" has infiltrated the public consciousness over the course of the past year. Tech products such as dating apps and search engines now boast AI-powered features. Even Meta's WhatsApp now has Meta AI built in, for no discernible purpose whatsoever. The consensus seems to be that adding the term "AI" to any product automatically raises its value in the eyes of consumers.

And sadly, they're right. Non-technical consumers tend to be a simple-minded bunch. On one hand, I feel like I should be outraged at this brazen exploitation of their gullibility. On the other hand, money needs to move in this economy, and if someone absolutely has to be parted from their money, it might as well be fools.

Shut up and take my money!

Is AI even all that revolutionary at the moment? Back in March, Sam Altman declared that OpenAI had produced ChatGPT 4 which had enhanced reasoning abilities. This report tells us that ChatGPT 4 beats 90% of humans. If we take this to be true, does it then follow that all the "AI-powered" features in other products up to now, have been bullshit?

As it turns out, very few people produce technology purely for the love of technology. It's a business like any other. And part of business, is hype. I can't go a day without seeing some ad for certification for AI pop up on my screen. My feed is full of news as to how AI is going to disrupt the workforce. It's starting to feel like people want this to happen a lot more than AI is actually capable of it. Because the perception of potentially huge profits, draws investors. Investors keep the money coming in. Few people have the patience to invest significantly in something that might be huge in a decade. However, if you can show progress now or soon, that's when the cash register sounds start ringing.

AI up to now

Currently, at the very basic levels, AI is being used in cheap entertainment. My Facebook feed is filled with the products of people amusing themselves with wacky AI image or video generations. Walls of text are similarly generated through idle conversations with bots.

At work, generative AI is used to rewrite paragraphs or even generate entirely new ones, in emails or in reports. Or create graphics for presentations. Even video. In short, nothing that wasn't possible before AI.

The problem is, the content generated can't be implicitly trusted. And even assuming that it can, such content generation isn't anything remotely groundbreaking. Creating presentations? Rewriting paragraphs and emails and cover letters? Bluntly put, it's kids' stuff. Unless your command of the English language was terrible to begin with, this use of generative AI won't increase quality of output. At best, the speed of which said output is produced, will increase tenfold. Quickly produced crap, however, is still crap.

When I first encountered ChatGPT, I regarded it as a fun new toy which could do amusing things like write poems, generate data about a known subject and make stuff up. And yes, even provide code for well-known algorithms. I certainly wasn't seeing ChatGPT as an equal, much less a threat to my professional existence.

The code generation capabilities were potentially interesting... but ultimately, nothing I couldn't accomplish with a Google search. And, of course, some judicious copy-pasting.

AI in the military?

If one were into conspiracy theories, we could even entertain the idea that AI is actually more advanced and being used by the military and secret organizations. The insipid content-generating version is the one that mere mortals like us are allowed to use, in order to distract us and lull us into a false sense of security. So while we're too busy using AI to genderswap our favorite movie stars and making crappy deepfake porn, some people are doing exactly what they want.

Depressing thought, eh? Anyway...

AI in the future

One question I keep getting asked is, will AI replace humans? Are our jobs in danger? Are programmer jobs in danger? I don't know, man. You've seen the state of Generative AI as it is now.

Text? We're talking about something that will cheerfully churn out chunks of text that looks reasonable but will probably not stand up to scrutiny. Just because something writes a lot of stuff in good English, doesn't mean the stuff is actually useful.

Images? You mean the art generators that keep rendering human hands with entirely too many fingers? The amount of effort it takes just to generate one useful image (which can never be replicated) is off-putting unless you're just doing it for recreational purposes. As for video, forget about Sora and its ilk replacing actors and film directors. The observations I made about art generators above, applies here, too.

If you can be replaced at your job by technology that produces such unusable rubbish, perhaps AI isn't the problem. Perhaps the problem is that your job is so repetitive and needs so little human ingenuity that a machine could do it, and do it a million times faster.

The other possible problem, in the case of artists and writers, is that consumers are Phillistines and don't require content to be all that good. They're happy with sucky AI generated monstrosities, as was the case recently when a local artist's work was plagiarised with AI.

This is not to say that AI will not eventually replace us. "Eventually" being the operative word. For this to happen, AI would have to hit some kind of critical point. Self-programming? Learning new logic instead of simply adding data to its memory? Actual creativity instead of merely approximating existing data from human beings?

And the golden question: When will this happen?

I don't know the answer to that question. No one does. There are too many possibilities. It could happen a hundred years from now. Or fifty. It could happen next week, or even after breakfast tomorrow. The only thing that's clear is, in its current form, AI is not even remotely close to being an average human replacement. However, once it arrives at that critical point, not only will AI have that human spark, it will have the speed gifted to it by technology. As to what would happen next, use your imagination.

In King Arthur's
Court.

This reminds me of a novel I once read, by Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In the story, Hank Morgan time travels and finds himself in Camelot, making the acquiantance of the likes of Arthur, Merlin and Lancelot. The medieval English are initially hostile, but Morgan has a gun on him, and uses it to devastating effect. To the people of these times, this looks like powerful magic even though to us it's just, you know, a gun. They end up worshipping him as some kind of great wizard while Merlin looks jealously on.

Because, as we know, technology that is sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

Just for readers who are terrible with analogies, here are several parallels I can draw from that story to this situation. Generative AI looks like the gun. The promoters of AI technology such as Jensen Huang and Sam Altman, are Hank Morgan. And the rubes gushing about how transformative this new technology is, are, tragically, those primitive and technologically backward Englishmen.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence may or may not be increasing in actual technological depth, but its mentions are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, if not its actual usage. Time will tell if all this is smoke and mirrors.

Right now, with all the hype, AI doesn't actually need to be that good in order to gain traction. Perception is a huge part of this. As long as there are rubes around willing to uncritically swallow what the snake oil peddlers are selling, there'll be enough goodwill to carry it. But even that goodwill is going to run out at some point. By that time, let's see if AI has made any actual progress.

Maybe all these people who are hyping this up, who don't appear to have ever written a single line of code in their lives, are seeing something I'm not. I remain open to the possibility that I'm wrong about this. I want to be wrong about this. It would be beyond exciting if so.

Artificial regards,
T___T

Is it really ScarJo, and why does it matter?

If you're both a fan of Hollywood and tech, the tail end of May must have been eventful for you. A-list movie star Scarlett Johansson took legal action against tech company OpenAI for using her voice without permission, for promotion of their product. Just to elaborate, in case there's even the remotest chance that you don't know who or what OpenAI is, it's the company that is responsible for generative technology such as ChatGPT, Dall-E and Sora.

What happened was that OpenAI included Voice Mode to ChatGPT, where the user can choose a voice out of a few presented options, to engage with ChatGPT.

Voice Mode.

The sticking point was that one of the voices, named "Sky", sounded an awful lot like Scarlett Johansson herself. In the days that followed, ScarJo revealed that OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, had approached her twice for permission to use her voice for that purpose, and she had declined to give it. It sounded like OpenAI had gone ahead anyway, disregarding her objections, when they launched the new feature. Johanssen, herself no stranger to suing corporations when necessary, did not hesitate to call out Open AI.

Was it ScarJo, though?

Apparently not! OpenAI apologized to Johansson for the confusion and clarified that the voice wasn't hers, but belonged to a voice actor whom they hired for the job. She simply sounded an awful lot like Johansson, and had her mannerisms.

Nevertheless, OpenAI took down the voice "out of respect" but the bonfire that was the controversy continues to rage on. Though it begs the question: if OpenAI are completely innocent of the charge, why is there a need to do that?

AI generated
image of ScarJo.

I can't verify if the voice is indeed Scarlett Johansson's, or simply sounds similar. I couldn't pick Johansson voice out of a lineup for the simple reason that I'm not great with voices. Also (heh heh) I spend significantly more time looking at rather than listening to her.

But perhaps that's not the important point in this entire thing. If AI can legally replicate any celebrity's likeness for the purpose of promoting any product, service or agenda regardless of that celebrity's intentions, that entails a couple of implications.

The first, and arguably less important, is financial. Now, I'm not concerned with ScarJo specifically. She'll be fine; this woman makes more money in a month than most of us do in a year. However, just being able to ride on the back of someone else's popularity to promote whatever you want without needing to pay that person a cent, strikes me as fundamentally and ethically wrong.

The more alarming implication

The second implication, is, of course, having someone else use your image to sell something you don't endorse. In an age where deepfakes and misinformation abounds, this is a huge, glaring red flag.

Beware!

Take the case of one Gina Carano. Back in 2021, she found herself being cancelled due to some remarks she made on Social Media. Whether one agrees with her or not, the fact remains is that she aired those views. She stood behind them, and suffered the consequences. There is no debate about that.

But what if she didn't espouse those views? What if she only appeared to do so because someone made an AI deepfake of her spouting those views? Now we're wandering into some truly sinister territory.

Sam Altman himself posted a Tweet on X, leading up to the release of the new feature, referencing the movie Her, which, quite ironically, starred Scarlett Johansson herself as an AI generated voice, thus implying that the voice of Sky in ChatGPT's Voice Mode was really ScarJo. Now, he could have been completely innocent of the charge of stealing ScarJo's voice for OpenAI. The voice could really have, as claimed, come from a completely unrelated voice actress. With that stunt from him, it no longer matters. The existing fears that people have towards generative AI could only have been amplified after this debacle, regardless of the legal outcome.

Seriously, between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, what is it with tech company CEOs doing stupid shit and acting like consequences are for lesser mortals?

Also, if anyone feels like arguing that it's not too far-fetched for Scarlett Johansson to endorse OpenAI, do remember that this woman is in the business of filmmaking, an industry that OpenAI's Sora may well one day disrupt. Call it a failure of imagination on my part, but I can't see her (or any other actor) championing that.

In the Final Analysis

It doesn't matter one iota if Sky was really ScarJo. Perception is everything, especially in a world where AI is generating content.

Whether or not OpenAI survives this legal battle; indeed, whether this even results in a legal battle at all, its public image has taken a serious battering.

Looks like Sky is the limit!
T___T

Trail of the Catfish (Part 1/2)

Several dangers lurk amidst the glitzy facade of the webosphere, and one of these is catfishing. This is a scenario where one person masquerades as someone else to manipulate a user into doing something foolish - usually parting with money or information. I was unfamiliar with the term (but not the phenomenon) until a friend of mine got hit with a particularly bad case of it.

At the time, I was an agency-contracted software developer, considering further education, struggling with my new role as a husband. I was being besieged on multiple fronts - professional, academic and personal. I had my fingers in way too many pies as it was. And thus I did not deal with this as immediately and firmly as I might have. Also, strictly speaking, it wasn't my situation to deal with.

How it went down

Over dinner one evening, this friend of mine told me he was in love. He had met this woman online through WeChat, and she was now his girlfriend. When he showed me a picture, I was impressed. Cute, great figure. The only question was - why would she be interested in my friend? He wasn't ugly, but appearance-wise, he was no hunk. He was in his mid-forties, not particularly well-off, and I had never been under the impression that he was especially charming. Indeed, I had been laboring under the impression that he was the archetypical 40-year old virgin.

A pretty girl on camera.

Still, stranger things have happened. I was prepared to be happy for my friend. Why look a gift horse in the mouth, eh?

It was about to get stranger still, however. He told me he had never heard her voice "live", only through sound clips. And whenever he tried to video call her, she never picked up. But they spent several nights chatting away (via text and sound clips) into the wee hours of the morning, and he even serenaded her with his own singing several times.

So, I was supposed to believe that he hooked her with his singing voice? A lot less believable, but maybe there was something about my friend that I, as a heterosexual male, wasn't seeing.

Of more concern was the fact that he had never interacted with her live. In this day and age of deepfake technology, even interacting live isn't such a big deal for authenticity anymore. But not even having that? Fishier than the River Nile. The words of my favorite comedian Bill Burr comes to mind.

"That's not a red flag; that's the fucking Soviet Union."

The Investment

As we spoke, my friend also revealed that his girlfriend (though I was having serious doubts about the veracity of that term by that point) had introduced him an investment site where he had already put in twenty thousand dollars of his own money, and according to him, he had already earned more than ten thousand off his initial investment. Now I'm no expert in that department, but that seemed like a decent return. Actually, it was positively too good to be true.

Investment site.

He wanted to send this woman ten thousand dollars of his earnings as a gesture of appreciation. This seemed like good news - at least he could draw out his earnings, right? He had already tried to send the money, and the bank had refused to facilitate this transfer because it fit the pattern of many online scams. Thus he was wondering if he could transfer me some funds so I could affect part of the transfer on his behalf. I declined, not because I was against him sending money - that was frankly none of my business - but because, in principle, I am deeply uncomfortable with anyone messing with my account. Eventually, later on, he finally managed to send the money, in three separate installments.

I had a look at the site. And then I Googled it. What came up was, well, more red flags. Apparently this site was being flagged for suspicious activity. When I pointed it out, my friend said that he was aware. That figured; he was a grown-ass man and he could do his own damn Google search, right?

My initial reaction

If you're anything resembling a normal person, reading this, your inbuilt danger alarm must be ringing like mad by now. There were way too many things about his story that stank. In fact, the entire story stank. It reeked like an open sewer. It sounded like my friend was getting in dangerously deep and needed a reality check.

But from whom would that reality check come? Me?

Don't stick your
hand into that fire!

In all honesty, I chose to deal with my own immediate problems and largely left it to my friend's common sense to help him navigate this potential minefield. After all, it wasn't like I had any personal experience with pursuing online romances - what did I know, really?

Sure, I could have said something. Anything. I could have pointed out how ridiculous all this sounded. But would I be pointing out anything he himself didn't realize and didn't want to admit to himself? Would I be saying anything that his mother and siblings had not already been saying? Why would he listen to me, if he was already ignoring their counsel? With that in mind, would talking actually accomplish anything, or would it just be talking for the sake of talking?

I'm a software developer. What kind of software developer does something for the sake of achieving nothing? A fucking useless one, that's what.

No. If I was going to say anything, I was going to have to do better than just talk. I was going to have to present evidence of some sort. Thus, I wished him the best of luck and went on my way. I did eventually discover evidence, but it was too little, too late.

Next

The fallout!

Much Ado About FaceApp

A great deal has been said about FaceApp, which for some inexplicable reason is probably the hottest deepfake-for-fun app on the market right now, and how Russians are using the data collected to gather information on our faces.

For some background, FaceApp is one of those mobile apps people use to upload facial photographs (usually their own) and perform digital surgery on, to see how they'll look as older or younger people, as the opposite sex, with facial hair, and so on. It's good silly fun, though it was kind of disturbing to see how eerily like dear old Dad I looked when I aged my own photo. And how much more handsome my wife looks like as a man, than me.

At some point, I even thought about writing an app review for FaceApp... but what the hell, it's pretty pointless. It doesn't do anything (for free, that is) that Snapchat already does better, except its interface is a whole lot less annoying than Snapchat's because you don't have a whole lot of other functionality to learn. I had fun with it... and one of the things I did was to play around with Thanos's face!

The original

Interesting.

Aging filter.

Er...

OK, ew,  that is without doubt
the ugliest transsexual
I've ever laid eyes on.

So, all that aside, there was some growing concern that FaceApp's servers were storing all the data that was being uploaded on them, despite their claims that data was being cleared.  And that this contravenes privacy and all that jazz. It came to the point where FaceApp had to show this message whenever you start it up.

And I know they only recently added it because I was playing with FaceApp way before all this commotion began.

Facial Recognition

On that note, facial recognition has made some progress as a technology. Now some mobile phone cameras can detect the race, gender and approximate age of a person simply by scanning the user's face. That's some awesome shit, right? We can even use facial recognition to lock and unlock phones.

Wait. Uh-oh...

That means that deepfake technology could conceivably simulate your facial features enough to bypass any security measures you may have implemented using your facial features. That certainly throws a spanner in the works, yes?

To continue that train of thought, if FaceApp had records of your facial features, it could bypass any security setting depending on facial recognition. Now, that's pretty scary. Think of your face as a key, and FaceApp as a key duplication machine.

Nah, I'm just kidding. Mobile phones have come a long way from the days where they could be easily fooled by photographs. Honestly, if that were still an issue, the last thing you should lose any sleep over is FaceApp.

Should we be worried anyway?

Maybe. If you're paranoid about people knowing what you look like, and being tracked as to your whereabouts. Personally, I'm a nobody and not worth the effort, so I think I'm pretty safe.

But you know what? FaceApp doesn't have anything that you probably already have uploaded to Social Media. Yes, all your very best selfies on Facebook, Instagram, God knows what else. If you're not a Social Media user, yes, FaceApp might represent a threat. But to the world at large? Unbunch your underpants, children. FaceApp is the least of your worries. It's not the only app of its kind, and it's not even the best of its kind.

And considering you can upload not just your own face, but photos of other people, there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent others from uploading your face onto FaceApp. Worrying at this point seems like an exercise in futility.

The cool (and morbid) thing about all this is...

The photos of you that were uploaded, could be added to the data bank that helps train the learning algorithm to synthesize faces. Think about it - long after you're dead and gone, part of you is going to exist for ever and ever. In perpetuity. Not just in some moldering Facebook In Memorandium page, but in an app that people actually access frequently.

Probably not the kind of immortality most people wish for, but well, damn.

Talk about taking something at face value!
T___T

Fake news? No, fake nudes!

Deepfake technology has been up and coming for the past few years. From facial synthesis to cloned voices to video manipulation, the possibilities for abuse are terrifying. For instance, there may come a day when audio and video evidence can no longer be submitted in court because fake media is indistinguishable from the real thing.

Terrifying, undoubtedly. But also fascinating.

From a technical point of view, this application of technology is interesting. It's art and science in one heady package. The myriad of possibilities for actual practical use ranging from the mundane (test profile photos for Social Media simulations) to the awesome (fully computer-generated action movies where actors aren't at risk of getting injured).

But sometimes people go too far. And a couple weeks ago, the development team behind the now-defunct app DeepNude found out the hard way.

DeepNude is an app that creates simulated nudity. It purports to digitally remove the clothing from any picture of a woman, and display her naked. When this app was released, the outrage went viral, and while I'm not a big fan of online outrage in general, it's hard to say this was wholly undeserved. Women, in particular, were horrified at the implications regarding enabling perverted fantasies and revenge porn.

The tech, in layman's terms

Of course, DeepNude doesn't exactly digitally remove clothes to reveal the actual person's naked body beneath. Unless they had actual footage of that person's naked body (certain celebrities in the adult entertainment industry, for example), that would be impossible. That person might have tattoos, birthmarks, or sporting a third nipple. There's no way to tell.

What this app actually does is refer to its database of body parts and replace the clothed body in the photo with a computer-generated nude one. Kind of like what people have been doing to celebrity photos (painstakingly using Photoshop or something), but now automated via software.

Apology and shutdown

The creators of DeepNude issued an apology, after shutting down their operation when it crashed due to overwhelming traffic.

Here is the brief history, and the end of DeepNude. We created this project for users' entertainment a few months ago. We thought we were selling a few sales a month in a very controlled manner. Honestly, the app is not that great, it only works with particular photos. We never thought it would become viral and we would not be able to control the traffic. We greatly underestimated the request.

Despite the safety measures adopted (watermarks) if 500,000 people use it,  the probability that people will misuse it is too high. We don't want to make mney this way. Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we dn't want to be the ones who sell it. Downloading the software from other sources or sharing it by any other means would be aganst the terms of our website. From now on, DeepNude will not release other versions and does not grant anyone its use. Not even the licenses to activate the Premium version.

People who have not yet upgraded will receive a refund.
The world is not yet ready for DeepNude.

If you ask me, this seems too little, too late.

This app is deeply sexist not because of misogyny. Not because it shows women nude. But because it doesn't do the same for men. If you feed the app a man's image, it's going to show a naked woman's body with a man's head.

This is only a simulated
example using my sick
Photoshop skillz!

So if this app only allows users to "strip" women (and deny the ladies a similar pleasure), what's this for other than cheap male thrills? The creators didn't think it would be abused? They don't want to make money this way? That's cute.

The world is not yet ready for DeepNude? Bitch, please. As mentioned earlier, people have been doing this for years. The app simply made it easier. The world's been more than ready for something like DeepNude for a while now. Guess it was really a matter of time.

An interesting question

I've seen people question why the "perverted geeks" like the creators would think this was a good idea in the first place. It seemed like a genuine question, so I thought I'd answer that.

You see, that's the thing about us developers. We don't think. Not much about the non-technical stuff, anyway.

Case in point - when I first heard about the app, you know what my first thought was? Not how horrifying and misogynistic it is, but how something like that is supposed to work.

Even after processing the entire spectacle, moral outrage is the last thing on my mind. (Not being a woman, any moral outrage I expressed would come off as disingenuous, at best) My predominant position is that Deepfake technology has tremendous potential, and the creators of DeepNude using it as wank material strikes me as a huge waste.

Generally, when a developer is presented with a problem, our first instinct is to solve it, not to moralize it. We spend more time thinking about whether or not it can be done, rather than whether or not it should be done. That's why we need business people to tell us what's actually useful and commercially viable (and in good taste). Because, on this evidence, left to our own devices, us geeks would just waste our time churning out technically brilliant but utterly useless junk.

We automate stuff. And in this case, the choice of stuff to automate was unfortunate.

And that's the naked truth!
T___T