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Comment by TrackerFF

13 hours ago

I wonder how that works for very similar looking people.

There's one photographer, François Brunelle, who has a project where he takes pictures of doppelgängers: http://www.francoisbrunelle.com/webn/e-project.html

This is very odd. Hardly any of them look alike let alone doppelgänger status...

> I wonder how that works for very similar looking people.

AFAIK, copyright allows for independent creation (unlike patents), so unless one person had deliberately copied the other's appearance, there should be no problem.

There are indeed many people that look very similar, and that will only increase if the efforts to eradicate uniqueness and actual separated diversity are successful, but there is also a lesson in the basic concept of, similar is not same. A single wrinkle more or less or a shift in an angle, and it’s not you anymore. The whole concept of likeness is a spurious one at best, akin to how the aristocracy functioned in the past where e.g., the depiction of their profile on a coin was a means of control too.

I was just recently trying to find an associate from my past with an unfortunately common whole full name in his language and was rather surprised at how many of the people depicted online with his name looked extremely similar to him, but upon closer discernment were surely not him. How do you discern that a “deepfake” (what a dumb term) is similar to you and not just similar to anyone else?

Also, what if AI is just trained with images of you? The consequent image will similarly only be an inspiration of you, not you, not the same as even using images in an attempt to graft a very similar facial feature onto an image or map it into a video.

It is in fact also what artists do in physical medium, they look at something/someone and are inspired by it to create an illusion that gives the impression of similarity, but it is not that thing/person. Will this new law possibly make art illegal too because people have not thought this through?

On a digital screen, it is of course also not you at all, it is individual pixels that fool the mind or give an illusion. It is really a pernicious muddling of reality and logic we have allowed to emerge, where the impression of depiction is the property of someone even though it is not that person, but also only if it is the means for control, ie money. Mere peasants have no control over their image taken in public.

The Sphere in Vegas is another good example of this on a large scale, each “pixel” is roughly 6” apart from the other and about 2” in diameter, for all intents and purposes separate objects, each only projecting one array of colors in a matrix of individual LEDs. Up close it looks no different than a colored LED matrix, only when you stand sufficiently far away is your mind tricked into believing you see something that is not really there.

Frankly, these moves to “protect” are very much a direct assault on free expression and even may create unintended consequences if art exceptions do not apply anymore either. Is it now illegal for me to paint a nude, how about from an image that I took of someone? What about if I do it really well from my own memory? What about if I use a modeling tool to recreate such a nude as a digital 3D object from images or even memory? Is AI not also simply a tool? Or is it more?

  • > How do you discern that a “deepfake” (what a dumb term) is similar to you and not just similar to anyone else?

    Presumably the only reason to use a deepfake of a specific person is to produce things specifically in relation to that person. Otherwise, why bother? So “is this about the individual or just coincidence?” isn’t likely to be a factor in any complaint made. This seems like a hypothetical rather than something that is likely to need answering in practice.

    • You are missing the malicious intent. Maybe I simply claim that whatever you created is a “deepfake” of me and now you owe me. I’ll just assume you have heard of parent trolls? Wanted to make a very we will see AI/Deepfake trolls?

      You presume both too much and not enough.

      3 replies →

  • The amazing thing is that we have different countries and they can all do their own thing.

    Then we see how they’re doing and decide - hey let’s not be like them.