Adventures In Our Sci-Fi Present
Digital avatars in commercials & socially engineering algorithms: Context Collapse #158
Fun fact: We live in the science fiction future.
It’s not a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. It’s also not an opinion. It’s a fact.
I’m talking about this because I’ve been thinking about Bruce Willis’ digital twin. The beloved actor, who retired from acting this year due to aphasia, has a “digital twin” that was created to appear in ad campaigns back in 2021. The “digital twin” is the creation of Deepcake, a startup that boasts their work with large talent firms CAA and Special Artists in their marketing materials.
Per Ryan Gajewski at the Hollywood Reporter:
According to Deepcake, the studio worked with MegaFon in August 2021 on an ad campaign starring Bruce Willis. Deepcake did not work with Willis’ team directly and never entered into an agreement with him to use his “digital twin” for any additional purpose.
“Our engineers processed a dataset composed of 34,000 images of Bruce Willis and made his ‘digital twin’ for the series of MegaFon ads,” the spokesperson said. “Bruce Willis, whose bilateral contractual agreements with MegaFon remain unknown to Deepcake, appreciated our service and described it as ‘a very new and interesting experience’ in the official MegaFon press release.”
Willis’ avatar (I’m getting tired of writing digital twin over and over again. Avatar it is) made some pretty convincing commercials for Russian mobile provider MegaFon pre-Ukraine invasion in 2021.
Because we live in the future, this computer-generated Bruce Willis avatar makes for a convincing commercial for a few seconds at a time. That’s pretty damn impressive.
It also means that the uncanny valley keeps becoming smaller and easier to traverse. Today we’re able to create a digitally-generated avatar that can star in a 30-second television ad and in a few years we’ll likely be able to create convincingly “real” avatars that can stay on screen for a minute. Then for five minutes. Then for ten…
All it takes is having enough high quality digital photographs and video of a celebrity (or an non-public person!) to train these digital avatars on. Low entry barrier, high weirdness possibilities.
Two other future-y things I’m thinking about…
This crazy white collar crime (or maybe intelligence service?) project where an unknown party is making fake Chief Information Security Officer profiles for large corporations on LinkedIn:
Per Brian Krebs:
“Because these profiles get ingested and accepted as gospel by a number of data-scraping services, they end up influencing Google search results. Google for "who is chief information security officer at Chevron" and you get the fake CISO.
Fake the identity, influence the search engine algorithms, make hacking into the systems of large corporations much easier. Do the profiles have to be well-made and 100% perfect? No, they just need to make them just good enough to fool search engines and a VIP or two who can be fooled.
The fact that, at press time, it sure looks like Elon Musk and Twitter’s board have come to an agreement on Elon Musk purchasing Twitter at $54.20 per share.
Over the past fifteen+ years, Twitter the service has evolved into the world’s text-based chatroom across national borders, languages, demographics and subcultures. It’s wildly popular among a minority of users who hold disproportionate influence on trends in politics, culture, the economy, academia and more. Twitter the service is run by Twitter the company, which is infamously dysfunctional and has had consistent problems turning their wildly popular platform into a stable, revenue-generating business.
1990s cyberpunk writers like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson spent a heck of a lot of time thinking about global perpetual conversations in the digital ether. Now we have them. For my fellow rememberers-of-rabbit-ear-antenna-televisions, remember when televisions would sign off at night instead of US Twitter slowly easing into Europe Twitter?
…And, with that, time for this humble newsletter writer to go offline for Yom Kippur. Gmar chatima tovah and enjoy this blast of weird high holiday history and Leonard Cohen.
See you Friday.