Reality: Make It Until You Fake It
Maybe your days are numbered, Instagram?
We live in some pretty amazing times. What I will refer to generally as “IA” can do more things than ever, and more realistically - generate text, generate photos, edit your photos.
And this particularly amusing (and scary) case of the blond gal who resembles an Indian man.
Now some people, especially the younger generations, stare in disbelief as us older folks are confused by what is real and what is IA-generated on the internet. Fair enough, I guess. But at the rate technology is evolving, it won’t be long until those IA generated photos and videos are so realistic that it is no longer possible to determine the difference between the real ones, and the fake ones.
Which leads to an interesting question, one posed by philosophers and more intelligent people before me: What is “real”?
How do you determine what is real? Maybe our entire existence is just an IA simulation spanning what we would call thousands (or millions) of years.
Back in the day, we would say “Seeing is believing”.
But today…. is it? Can we believe what we see?
Can we trust in what we hear?
(Perhaps for the moment we can believe what we smell, but that’s a different post).
It is not possible, with just a quick search on Google (or ChatGPT, or whatever you use to search these days) to find free programs that allow you to take a selfie and insert your photo in tourist locations around the world. So it’s now not even necessary to travel to London, Paris, Madrid or Tokyo - just upload your photo, and you are there. And you can then, of course, share that on Instagram for all your friends to see and be jealous of your latest trip.
Which you didn’t take. You were never there. It isn’t real.
And maybe, just maybe, you will see those travel photos of your friends / followers (whatever!) on Instagram and no longer feel envy or jealousy, because you no longer believe those trips are real.
In fact, that person that you swear you knew from high school that you follow might not even be that person. Might not even be a person at all.
In the end, it may just become a vacuum of IA talking to itself.
What a waste of time. A real waste of time. Whatever “real” means these days.
