The Internet received a wake-up call with the Pope in a $3,500 Balenciaga puffer coat. It was AI-generated by Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old construction worker from Chicago. In may 2024 we can do this in real-time..

Video above by 8teAPi and here's Vermeer's Girl with Pearl Earring by hailuoai.video...

..and Tom Cruise is hard at work, or maybe not.


The video above produced by @deeptomcruise. Images, video - how about audio? Here's a cover of Barbie Girl by Johnny Cash presented by @ThereIRuinedIt

We have to do something..

...about things which never happened.

A deepfake detonation of a bomb at the White house
Deepfake image of bombing at the Pentagon

And we have to do something about extremely disturbing deepfake porn. An investigation by Bellingcat described how the company AnyDream commercializes the technology. Faces are real, someones daughter, ex-girlfriend or classmate. The image is fake and rendered using Stable Diffusion AI.

AI deep-fake porn with real faces on rendered bodies. Pixelated.
Fake AI image using real faces

Here fully AI generated humans speaking with lip-sync, created by Microsoft's VASA-1 project. Generated with a still image + a text file with the script.

Shared reality

We used to have a shared reality. Something happened, or it didn't. Then we argued about why it happened, the framing and the narrative.

Socialism versus Capitalism, Human error versus technical error, Evolution versus Divine intervention. We discussed how to make something happen more often, or prevent them from happening altogether.

What Wikipedia teaches us about balancing truth and beliefs is a TED talk by Katherine Maher.

We had a place to start - an image, a photograph, something shared, something to talk about. And we have our history and our beliefs from lived experience. Truth emerges somewhere in between. What happens when we change that which is shared, the place to start from.

If we ask the machine, this is what Perplexity AI has to say..

The fabric of reality is shaped by various elements such as images, voices, photographs, and narratives. In this era of multiple narratives and explanations, it becomes increasingly challenging to determine what can be trusted and believed. The prevalence of fake news and disinformation campaigns adds to the confusion and undermines our shared understanding. The internet and technology have had a profound impact on our thinking and perception, with the potential to reshape our epistemology.

At some point we will need a chain-of-trust, I believe blockchain & NFT technology can enable this. The creator signs the original source media into a blockchain, and as the video, audio or photograph travels in distribution and outlets it is tracked in the chain.

The photographer is now the "source of truth" that this is indeed an authentic photograph which has not been AI generated or manipulated in Photoshop etc. This is what Numbers Protocol enables, and I think we'll see a lot of this kind of technology going forward.

Numbers Protocol is the asset-driven protocol to make digital media traceable and verifiable through its innovative process. By making digital media traceable and verifiable, we are able to address critical issues in the digital media space, namely misinformation, copyright and royalty distribution.

Note: no affiliation with Numbers or Captureapp