AI didn’t invent fake video. It just made fake video too good.
Years ago at Fresh Tape Media, we used to make videos like this for the Denver Broncos Football Club all the time: take a recognizable movie or TV scene, put athletes’ faces on the characters, make something funny, and post it. The face swaps were objectively pretty bad. And people loved them.
That has me thinking about the reaction to what we’re seeing now from Higgsfield AI, Open Al, and the rest of the new gen of AI tools. Conceptually, it ain't actually that different. Take an existing piece of culture, change who is in it, make something that never really happened, and hopefully entertain people.
But there’s one enormous difference: the old stuff looked fake. And maybe that was a feature, not a bug.
Nobody watched one of our old face swaps and wondered whether an NFL player had actually appeared in that movie. The bad tracking, mismatched lighting and pasted-on faces were basically a built-in disclaimer. Imperfecti...