Since I might have led some of you down the garden path with yesterday's fake news about 31/Atlas (although I owned up at the end of the article), here is another piece that needed fact checking
Anybody heard of Jessica Radcliffe? If yes, you've almost certainly been spending too much time on social media. If no, then don't worry - she doesn't exist.
A week or so ago some videos started circulating on social media that purportedly showed Jessica Radcliffe, an Orca Trainer, being killed by her Orca at a show. It was graphic and too bloody to show her. I came across it on my feed and once was once too often, and something just didn't seem right about it.
Jessica's posture seemed to be off somehow and at one point when the Orca was attacking the blood spatter seemed wrong and there was definitely something going on with the Orca's dorsal fin. So I decided to look further into it.
It took all of 10 seconds to discover that the video, and subsequent ones that apparently showed her body being recovered (a still of which I have used in the header here) were fake and about another 10 seconds to discover that there is no such person and that the whole thing had been generated using AI.
If I want to watch a horror movie I will make my own decision thank you very much. I do not expect or want such things to appear in my Facebook Feed.
Zuckerberg are you listening? Oh, that's right you don't give a s**t!
It is alarming that such things are regularly floated in the media, and particularly the internet, but that is not my greatest concern. What really bothers me is that while AI is improving all the time and it is getting harder and harder to tell the difference, there seems to be a lack of diligence on the part of the wider public both in terms of choosing what to watch (although social media algorithms have taken much of that choice away, leaving us only with the power to scroll on or turn off) and our dumb acceptance of what we are watching / reading.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it is right to necessarily control content (with the obvious exceptions which I shouldn't have to list) and that much should be left to the viewer discretion with appropriate safeguards in place, but AI can generate all kinds of things that are going way, way to far.
Nor am I against AI (although I think we have to handle it cautiously) nor its usage for creative purposes. As an author, I strongly oppose use of AI to support any kind of written content generation, but I see no problem with using it to create a book cover. Frankly the results are often excellent (so long as you are not trying to get the AI to draw a hand! lol) and it is much cheaper and more accessible than setting up a studio / location shoot with specialised equipment which may also involve others who will need paying too.
Just to illustrate, here is a potential cover for a forthcoming book that I hope to self publish in the very near future
I don't see anything wrong with it and I do assure you that my writing (including this) is all my own.
Finally, please always source check what you are reading / watching and encourage those around you to do the same because as Tom Kiefer lead singer of Cinderella wrote in the 1980s:
Everybody's got opinions, but nobody's got the answer.
Turns out he was prophetic and that is a sad indicator of where we are going as a civilisation. Reality itself is becoming blurred and unlike in the past it is not solely down to shades of perception.
As always stay safe and well my friends.
