Fake is Fake And I Hate Fake In All Forms

Agree. Those velociraptors and T-rexes looked exactly like the real ones I've seen in the zoo!

The ironic thing is that they went to all that trouble to make the look "realistic", and within a few years, the consensus among paleontologists was that that's not what dinosaurs looked like at all.

Which speaks to my point in the other thread about verisimilitude.
 
A cornucopia o' puns.

So, I'm working on a novel about an old Hollywood movie star and have been doing a lot of research on various real life personalities. At one point, I was trying to pick the right prominent playwright/scriptwriter of the 1930's for a fictional anecdote, so I read up on a few of them. (This sort of thing is one reason why it takes me so goddamn long to get anything done.)

One of those I looked up was Sidney Howard, who wrote the original screenplay for Gone With The Wind. But while the movie was in production, he was killed in what one film historian I read termed "a harrowing accident."

They didn't give any details, but my curiosity was piqued. What terrible event caused his death, that it would be described as "harrowing." Was he murdered? Killed in a horrific auto accident?

Nope. He had a farm in Massachusetts where he spent most of his time. One day, his tractor wouldn't start. He tried to get it going, and when it did, it lurched forward and crushed him against the wall of the barn. He was, of course, preparing to harrow his fields.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is word class punning.
 
Can you provide some examples of nearly-full CGI films wherein actors were denied work opportunities? I'm not arguing the point, I'm genuinely curious if there have been films made that have cost actors their jobs because of CGI use.

Someone still needs to voice the characters. Yeah, they could cobble together something that sounds close, but it definitely wouldn't sound authentic.
 
No, that isn't the face I was referring to.

That one is a mighty nice face indeed, even if she doesn't exist.

Not at all like the scary one.
 
I know this might be a shock to some of you but I have to admit that my avatar is not my real face. I'm actually much cuter in real life. Adorable even.
Clearly your picture is a fake. We all know that Vikings never had horns on their helmets.
 
They didn't give any details, but my curiosity was piqued. What terrible event caused his death, that it would be described as "harrowing." Was he murdered? Killed in a horrific auto accident?

Nope. He had a farm in Massachusetts where he spent most of his time. One day, his tractor wouldn't start. He tried to get it going, and when it did, it lurched forward and crushed him against the wall of the barn. He was, of course, preparing to harrow his fields.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is word class punning.
I need a "laugh at the pun while still respecting the human tragedy" reaction emoji here.
 
Mmmkay, since I seem to have missed out on the puns yesterday, I'll be that guy that tries and fails to come in late and get the conversation back on topic.

Fake seems like it's being used as a polemic here. I think it's obfuscating what's important and falling into a trap that's as old as humans. Literally every new technology that's ever been introduced that enables some new creative medium has been met with accusations of fakery. Up to and including the written word itself. I bet there were people shaking their fist at the sky when spoken language began to proliferate, too, because the uniform noises of words shattered the verisimilitude of their indistinct guttural utterances.

Generative AI's the big hot-button now. In some ways it is a new kind of thing that feels like it brings with it the capacity for a new and pernicious kind of fakery. But is there anything really new here? Bad text and bad images have been being generated on purpose by people for as long as those things have been able to exist. Is the capacity to generate these things on demand and with little effort really that different?

It's a little different, sure. In the same way that it used to take effort to write or type a letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp and address on it, and wait for the postal service to take it where it needs to go, and now you can push buttons on a magic box that transmits whatever you want at the speed of light to anyone that can access a magic box. That created the opportunity for spam to become ubiquitous and probably decreased demand for a postal service, but it's not an entirely new idea, and all the problems it created aren't exactly new either. They just look different because they're shaped by the medium in which they operate.

Point is, is generative AI 'fake'? I guess. But it's not new fake. It's just easier fake. The problems it creates will be shaped by the medium in which it operates.

And that kinda just glosses over what fake even means. In a sense, all our stories are fake. Does that make them worthless?

Obviously not. The kind of fake that bothers us is that which breaks with our sense of reality or humanity. We have the ability to perceive something as real even when we know it is not. We have the ability to assess verisimilitude; the realness of the fake.

So all of these things. CGI, practical effects, film and audio and photographic editing techniques, generative AI... they are tools for telling real fake stories. Some are old and calcified. Some are new and irritating. The new and irritating ones have seen the fists of old men shaken at them for as long as there have been people. And their children always seem to ignore them and figure out new and interesting ways to make art with them.

I'm thinking probably we ought to try and be more like those children, even if fist-shaking really feels like the correct response. Because it always has seemed that way to people whose view of the world has already calcified (that's me too, lest anyone think I'm casing aspersions). And it has pretty much never actually been the case.
 
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