The End of Smartphone Camera Justice
The irony of the “Karen Calls the Manager” meme is that we are all Karen.
Sure, the easy part is identifying the Karens who call the police on black kids selling water or on a black delivery driver she doesn’t recognize. A bit more biting is the realization that the jackass demanding better customer service and threatening to “Call Corporate” while filming the exchange on his phone is also Karen. The busybody citizen who stops to film the police pulling over a car or films a woman who failed to pick up her dog’s shit in a park are Karens as well.
Whether you want to accept it or not, the very act of pulling out your smartphone to film someone is a provocative act. It automatically signals an escalation. It is only different from Karen calling 911 and feigning fear in that her call is to a limited number of people; yours is broadcast to millions. No smartphone filming the incident, very likely leads to a completely different outcome.
The presence of an always available camera with unlimited film has had a profound impact on activism. Revolutionizing the way people document and share their experiences, the little rectangular super-computers have dramatically facilitated raising awareness about social issues and have helped to hold individuals and institutions accountable to the ideological agendas of the 'citizen journalist.'
This new power has elevated protest movements more often reliant on traditional media outlets to bypass the gatekeeping of mainstream media and directly distribute their content. This has democratized the dissemination of information, ensuring that stories and perspectives that might have been overlooked or marginalized by traditional media outlets can now reach a global audience.
This reach is now compromised so thoroughly that this tool of activism is all but over.
"...what’s really interesting about this work is not necessarily the image-manipulation per se, but the user interface. We’ve been able to use AI tools like GANs to generate realistic images for a while now, but most methods lack flexibility and precision. You can tell an AI image generator to “make a picture of a lion stalking through the savannah,” and you’ll get one, but it might not be the exact pose you want or need.
This model, named DragGAN, offers a clear solution to this. The interface is exactly the same as traditional image-warping, but rather than simply smudging and mushing existing pixels, the model generates the subject anew. As the researchers write: “[O]ur approach can hallucinate occluded content, like the teeth inside a lion’s mouth, and can deform following the object’s rigidity, like the bending of a horse leg.”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/19/23729633/ai-research-draggan-manipulate-images-click-and-drag
In the latest Indiana Jones installment, the technology is advanced from Tom Hanks in Polar Express to Harrison Ford playing himself and credibly seeming decades younger. The presence of such advanced digital enhancement is super cool but, given we all have highly capable computers in our back pockets and app developers are jonesing to get this technology into our hands, it's just a matter of time before the average kid can create completely fake videos of just about anything he desires.
The natural reaction is to be a bit freaked out. This is powerful. Disruptive. Just like the disruptive power of Twitter to mobilize protests across the world and the video of George Floyd's murder to galvanize an historic social justice movement. Twitter became a cesspool and it no longer regulates the fake accounts and now the presence of faux reality phone videos bring into question anything one might see online.
In middle school, there was a kid name Scott Riddle. He was huge and dumb. Worse, he knew he was dumb and it pissed him something fierce. So he took that anger on anyone he perceived as smarter than he was which turned to be practically everyone.
We humans are some gullible apes and combining that with our increased rage at the system, at the political tribes, at one another, we've all become some version of Scott Riddle. Try having a rational, non-hostile conversation with someone who believes in their core that Stanley Kubrick filmed the moon lighting in 1969 in a studio. It isn't possible. It's like talking to a lunatic who increasingly wants to smash your head with a framing hammer.
What happens when someone creates a fictional video of a cop killing a kid dancing on a street corner, a video of a drag queen in a pre-school twerking in the faces of hapless children, or a deep fake of campaigning politicians in the 2024 presidential race humping a Cocker Spaniel? We're primed to believe it even when we know it's probably bullshit. We can no longer believe our eyes, we can no longer trust that the things we see and hear are in any sense real. Given that our governing bodies are almost completely in the dark when it comes to new technologies, we cannot count on them to catch up and provide safeguards.
The only defense is to simply disbelieve all of it which leaves us all wandering in a wasteland of zombie information crawling slowly to eat our brains.
On the other hand, I'm really looking forward to the latest Indiana Jones.
