Hamilton is a famous American musical. I would think it encourages people to innovate around how to deepfake the dead because it not only is not wrong, it can be very right.
Visit Grant’s Tomb, meet actors in real life who play him and bring his amazing story to light to get rid of decades of disinformation.
To deepfake the dead can be very right.
The big question is who owns a content control/consent role for someone in our past. If you can’t decide that, there’s a much bigger problem at hand than the presentation layer.
I write this in response to a long blog post by You the Data asking “is it ever ok”, which wanders around this topic yet doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.
…for others to warp, manipulate, and supplement it with inauthentic sentiment or action does seem to wreak damage. This damage — a dilution of the truth — is what critics are responding to. Now, as we begin to figure out what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable in this strange new world, we should undoubtedly be considering whether we’re content to be reimagined as a scripted bot, avatar, or deepfake after our death.
Begin to figure out what is right and wrong? What?
Don’t dilute the truth, sure. And don’t blame that on deepfakes.
The presentation layer isn’t as significant here as the need for measuring integrity of any message (e.g. ask any historian if the Hamilton musical is damaging).
The only case to be made here is that people believe in novel platforms more (overlooking obvious errors) because of novelty, but that itself is an ages old problem not unique to deepfakes.
Google’s driverless car for example failed it’s driving test three times (revealed via FOIA) yet was given a license by the state of Nevada anyway because someone stupidly said “let’s give robots a chance”. That’s base human corruption, not really to do with risk from the technology itself.
To deepfake the dead can be very right.
Do I need to say it again?
Now go visit Grant’s Tomb and meet the actors who deepfake Grant and help end the rampant problem of disinformation about him. In fact, finding human actors to deepfake Grant is so costly, using technology to do it inexpensively may be an imperative.
I’ve been in far too many sticky situations with digital cameras in places where trust and safety are unclear, even having to navigate my way out of angry crowds and guns being pointed. Some of them have been mentioned on this blog before.
It is from this personal experience I was excited to read a new article that begs questions of safety, trust and journalistic integrity, related to images taken during US insurrection January 6th.
Journalists argue that if they are forced to reveal confidential sources or turn over any news information they have gathered but not yet published, it will erode the trust of sources and the public, who will doubt the independence that journalists often claim.
“Not yet published” is a weird battle to fight.
If a journalist asked for explicit consent to embed and then publish the images (to public), then there’s no reason to not publish the images (consent already granted and police are members of the public).
And if a journalist didn’t ask permission to take images, then they aren’t violating anything since they never sought consent in the first place.
Either way if they refuse to share images with the public (e.g. as compelled for a social good like public safety, usually by the police) it doesn’t seem tied to any formal trust relationship with those the journalists were recording.
The article goes on to say the issue is the journalists now are being targeted and physically threatened with harm by the violent groups they photographed.
I have been studying the law regarding journalists and their sources for nearly 24 years. To my knowledge, U.S. journalists have rarely made the argument that they could face physical danger if they are forced to turn over information they have gathered. The closest parallel is a Washington Post reporter who successfully fought a subpoena from a war crimes tribunal 20 years ago because of fears of retribution in foreign conflict zones.
One possible solution would be for news outlets to publish all images that have not already been published on their websites.
Reasonable solution. Again the “not yet” is weird to me. If the authorization level is public than why not just go forward with making them pubic? The real reason doesn’t seem to be violation of trust or integrity — there would be more trust and integrity if they were published as originally intended.
In the Spring of 1974, 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army made world headlines when he emerged from the Philippine jungle after a thirty-year ordeal. Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine army and police, hostile islanders, and eventually successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and waiting for the day when his fellow soldiers would return victorious.
Related: two countries in Europe took a very long time to rid themselves of fascism.
Quick chart I made to illustrate where and when in Europe fascism took hold.
In other words, some Americans may still believe that… their country is meant only to be ruled by a small group of elite white men as the 1868 presidential candidate ticket still proclaimed after Civil War.
You can see here the campaign language used did not try to tone anything down or hide meaning:
Again I have to reiterate this campaign in 1868 was IMMEDIATELY AFTER CIVIL WAR ENDED.
And if that isn’t bad enough, thirty years later in 1898 (i.e. sons/daughters of the Civil War traitors) again ran that same “this is a white man’s country and white men must control and govern it” campaign in a violent coup in North Carolina. Source: Vox
Vox explodes the 1898 coup with great detail in a brief 2019 documentary called “When white supremacists overthrew a government: The hidden history of an American coup”.
I hate pie charts, so have a good look at these numbers and see why some Americans seem to be acting like an Onoda:
Speaking in round numbers you’re looking at a country run with almost 80% white men over 50, and almost half millionaires.
Some Americans are very concerned about these rich white men not being in control of the country (feelings of fear about loss and guilt when anti-racists run for office).
In 1868 the KKK even issued threats of violent lynching as intimidation to any white men caught voting for an anti-racist presidential candidate (women couldn’t vote and blacks would be lynched no matter who they voted for…).
Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”). Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)
Although the “let only white men rule” insurrectionists lost that election in 1868 (after losing their war in 1865) did they really surrender?
In 1916 the KKK won the presidential election using an “America First” campaign (marked by “wholesale murder” of black Americans, as well as a pandemic) and they did it again in 2016.
Update January 21: “The White Caps are the true American patriots and begged Trump to be President”
Just so we’re clear on what this video tells us, like it’s the 1800s again, I have taken a still from “The White Caps” KKK film of 1905, predating the 1915 film adaptation of The Clansman (Birth of a Nation):
1905 “The White Caps” movie depicts a vigilante group who post a warning sign on a man’s home then return armed with rifles to kidnap him and lynch (under pretense of protecting white women, a dominant theme in KKK platforms).
There’s an interesting side-note to use of the “white caps” in 1905. It perhaps was an appropriation of a 1889-1891 “Las Gorras Blancas” (the white caps) name used by a group in New Mexico.
The leader of Las Gorras Blancas (Herrera) is believed to have taken his costume inspiration from the mid 1800s hooded Ku Klux Klan, yet they operated mainly as fence cutters and barn burners — organized Latino resistance to injustices from illegal Anglo American land-grabber encroachments (“with barbed wire came hunger”)
It would be very ironic for a MAGA woman to claim that Latino vigilantes seeking removal of whites begged Trump to occupy the White House… so we have to assume she means the KKK.
As I am sure many of you know, a racist white male executive at Disneyland “created” Doritos to crush the Hispanic local tortilla chip inventor (Rebecca Carranza) and drive her family business under.
The headline in Popular Mechanics magazine saluted a manufacturing triumph in Los Angeles: “Tortillas Meet the Machine Age.” It was 1950, and the El Zarape Tortilla Factory, among the first to automate the production of tortillas, had used a tortilla-making machine for three years.
Corn and flour disks poured off the conveyor belt more than 12 times faster than they could be made by hand. At first many came out “bent” or misshapen, as company President Rebecca Webb Carranza recalled decades later, and were thrown away.
For a family party in the late 1940s, Carranza cut some of the discarded tortillas into triangles and fried them. A hit with the relatives, the chips soon sold for a dime a bag at her Mexican delicatessen and factory at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Arlington Avenue in southwest Los Angeles.
El Zarape 1950s Tortilla Factory in Los Angeles
Ok, let’s be honest. Nobody talks about her or how Disneyland crushed her with intention.
Here’s the Disneyland side of the story just so we’re clear here about racism and appropriation of others’ ideas:
1968 Doritos bag
When Disneyland opened [in 1955], it featured a Mexican(ish) restaurant called Casa de Fritos run by the Frito company. It was on New Orleans Street, near another product-placement eatery: Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House. It at the Casa de Fritos that the beloved Dorito was invented. Yes, really. Arch West, the Frito (later Frito-Lay) marketing executive credited with the product’s creation, died in 2011 and was buried with a layer of his tasty legacy sprinkled over his ashes. The Dorito legend varies: one version has it that West discovered tasty tortilla chips at a roadside stand…
The Frito Company “Mexican(ish)” restaurant was NEXT TO AUNT JEMIMA?!
Need I say more about Disneyland executives?
So in 1964 West was running Frito’s “Mexican(ish)” amusement park feature in “Frontierland” and he “discovered” tortilla chips at someone else’s stand that had been popular in Los Angeles since the late 1940s.
He was on a family vacation in Southern California in 1964 when he first bought a grease-smeared bag of toasted tortillas at a roadside shack.
That’s a quote from the Washington Post obituary for Arch West, which apparently didn’t think twice about writing “grease-smeared” to describe Hispanic-Americans (historically a very derogatory term used by racist lynch mobs as well as California legislators who in a 1855 “Greaser Law” criminalized “Spanish and Indian blood”).
West shamelessly copied the Carranza product and gave no money or credit to the inventor, let alone the stand.
Shameless appropriation.
But wait, let’s go back a step into Frito Company history where West was an executive.
Frito was a company started by a white man who “discovered” corn chips made and sold by someone else.
In 1932, C.E. Doolin entered a small San Antonio cafe and purchased a bag of corn chips. After learning the manufacturer was eager to sell his business, he bought the recipe and started making Fritos corn chips in his mother’s kitchen.
Do you believe Doolin “bought the recipe”?
I mean did Doolin while living with his mother and selling depression-era ice cream really fork out $100 in the middle of the great depression ($1500 today) for the recipe from his former boss (contrary to the story he just happened upon a newspaper ad, or just walked into a cafe one day)?
…purchased from Gustavo Olguin, a Mexican-American restaurant owner in San Antonio, where Doolin had worked as a fry cook. Olguin’s “fritos” (the name came from the Spanish word frit, meaning fried) were small fried corn chips made from masa dough. Doolin bought the recipe, Olguin’s hand-operated potato ricer, and nineteen customer accounts for the snack, all for $100.
And what made Gustavo Olguin rush to sell his “corn chips” business, hand over all his paying customers and flee to Mexico just as chips and snack foods were becoming widely popularized?
Fast forward to today, the genius of Carranza’s tortilla automation machines and her invention of mass-produced tortilla chips are obscure at best for Americans, yet everyone can recognize Doritos.
Now a member of the insurrection against the US has raised a stir by supposedly wearing Doritos on his lapel.
A fabricated image was used to incorrectly accuse him of wearing a “Q hate symbol“… or is that correct, even tangentially?
The “I love Doritos” response by the accused, instead of letting a correction of a correction stand on its own, perhaps clarifies everything.
