Social media makes fakes out of all of us. But this is worse. A thousand times worse. By a thousand miles.
Bird Lovegod gets miffed at ‘Ai Influencers” … Instagram accounts that are actually CGI actors… nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence, more like Artificial Influencers.
I’m not talking about unknown fakes, where the fake is a bot, or a room of hackers or malware distributors or political influencers. No No No. The latest fakes are real fakes. They call them Ai influencers, although a better name would be ‘Tween Manipulators.’ These are the equivalent of photoshopped models except nothing about them is authentic or real. These affronts to human integrity are totally CGI. They are characters, avatars, personalities, designed to do what? Collect followers. Gain influence. Then what? Be sold to the highest bidder? Be rented out as political manipulators? Certainly to be rented out as commercial promoters of buy more stuff. Can you tell I don’t like these avatars? Here’s what TechCrunch had to say on the rancid idea come to pretend at life.
The creators of these monstrosities, yes, plural, there are several, in fact the company behind them played a media scam whereby they pretended one of the fakes Instagram accounts was hacked by another fake, for the purposes of generating more media coverage. Fake news, I guess you could call that… where was I .. yes … The social engineers behind this provocation are a company called Brud, in LA of course, the home of make believe at scale gone wrong. If you want to read some of their fantasist garble, check out this statement. Or even more misdirecting, this weirdness http://uvuu.xyz/
Brud, and the people behind it, are playing a game. Actually, they’re playing 1.4million followers a game whereby they influence what those people think about and what they feel and understand. Influencers. Manipulators. Where do you draw the line? For me, the line is drawn when the people behind the face are not the face, when the truth is folded a thousand times until no one knows who is running what or why, and the only solution is to switch off, or stop caring and just accept. And that is a submission to we know not what. Would I like my child ‘influenced’ by a CGI character run by a secretive company in LA, whose avatars ask followers to ‘send me your star signs so I can analyse you all’. And they do? A company who hides behind confabulations, to create a story, and at the same time, to work in darkness. No thanks. If ‘Ai influencers’ are the future, that’s it, the future belongs to those who are able and willing to use digital creativity to manipulate millions of impressionable young people, because they are the market for such. It is impossible that situation won’t backfire. It’s one deception too many. I’m hitting delete. Switching off. Unfollowing. Gone.
Image by Aadhar Sharma Unsplash