Max Headroom is Real
Oh good gracious. The predicted happened: “Deepfake” news anchors, aka “digital puppets,” that can be programmed to say whatever a programmer—or the programmer’s employer—wants said have crossed the line from fiction to fact.
What could go wrong?
According to the New York Times, plenty:
…“Deepfake” technology, which has progressed steadily for nearly a decade, has the ability to create talking digital puppets. The A.I. software is sometimes used to distort public figures, like a video that circulated on social media last year falsely showing Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, announcing a surrender. But the software can also create characters out of whole cloth, going beyond traditional editing software and expensive special effects tools used by Hollywood…
The polished good looks of the avatar anchors of “Wolf News”—a fake newsroom with real pro-China ties—are “based on the the appearances of hired actors and can be manipulated to speak in 120 languages and accents.”
“Intelligent automation” is coming for you, “Fox & Friends.”
The tech is cheap, fast and easy. Synthesia, a software company with an office “above a clothing shop in London’s Oxford Circus,” offers monthly subscription plans for as low as $30. The company’s bread and butter clients use it mostly to make godawful corporate training videos. But as savvy, politically-focused marketers quickly figured out, the tech could just as easily be used to train people how to think: propaganda with a human-ish touch. At scale.
So we are now living in a badly dubbed AI movie. Which is quickly morphing into a seamlessly dubbed AI movie. Which is worse.
If we thought algorithms designed to boost advertising profits, or to distribute fake news at scale, or to bully-by-bot, were scary, this is everything that came before, turbocharged. This is AI + connectivity + speed + immersiveness + gaming + commerce + policy + speculation +++.
The messages are believable because we are literally are wired to believe the messengers: They look like us. They sound like us. We think they’re us.
The metaverse as envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg is an immersive cartoon that one enters via vertebrae-crushing headsets that literally blind users to the real world. It is populated with floating torsos wandering among tacky facsimiles of tacky places: conference rooms, commercial strips and really bad art galleries.
That’s Metaverse as Destination: a place where humans pixelate to adapt to the digital world.
But metaversal doors swing both ways. Digital facsimiles are rushing into our reality in the form of cheerful chatbots, diembodied voice assistants, and now as AI videobots. The “Wolf News” avatars stare into non-existent cameras, their gaze designed to connect to ours.
It is as if we are all playing a giant, collective game of dolls.
What began with emojis and cat faces on Snapchat and increasingly realistic “skins” is video games, has now burst out from the screen as full blown “alter egos,” belting out songs on a television talent show of the same name. Using body-tracking technology and all the wizardry of green-screen movie-making, digital personae are rendered blending the characteristics and aspirations of their human counterparts.
It’s “Singing in the Rain” meets “Blade Runner,” with the “replicants” in the spotlight, lip-syncing in perfect time while their humans hide behind the curtains doing the actual singing. To the judges and the audience in the room, and also to viewers at home, the illusion is complete. These replicants are real in every way but substance. And when they’re finished, they disappear in a swirl of digital sparkles back to the metaverse, wherever that may be.
When a contestant is cut from the competition and has to “go home,” there is one last performance where the curtain opens and singer and avatar share the stage. It is moving every time. The singers have different reasons for wanting “alter egos” — they’re shy, young, older, unpolished, out-of-shape, imperfect. They look like us. And through this ruse, we see them in all their loveliness. We also see the polish they felt they lacked. And how they wish they could be seen.
The inventive syntheses between the real and the surreal can be breathtaking, manipulative, transcendent, dark.
If there is an upside to the algorithmic perfection of “Max Headroom,” the original digital “talking head” who burst on the scene in the 1980s, it is an unexpected appreciation for the perfectly coiffed, makeup-entombed, teleprompter-dependent human news “presenters” that have been reading headlines to us for decades. Of course, they are also the inspiration for their no-salary-required, computer-conjured doppelgängers.
Sixty years ago, it was Walter Cronkite sitting in the anchor chair for the very first nationally televised 30-minute news show. When “the most trusted man in America” looked into a very real camera and said, “And that’s the way it is” at the end of each broadcast, everyone believed him. Cronkite took responsibility for reporting the news, the bad as well as the good, as accurately as he could.
But that was then.
This is now. Fake news organizations. Fake news anchors. Fake news.
And all too real consequences.
