![\"\"](\"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/as1-e1720815497644.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nThe ad is simple. A bus is held up in traffic after hitting a fruit cart, a young female passenger looks out her window at a handsome young man in a convertible. She gets out of the bus, gets in the car, and the man drives her away like a chauffeur while she\u2019s eating a candy bar.<\/p>\n
The young woman is Audrey Hepburn.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This has massively significant implications on our perception of the world in which we live, in ways nobody really talks about. But we\u2019ll come back to Audrey later.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t always seem like it, but humans are innately trusting.<\/p>\n
Whether an evolutionary development designed to make functioning as a social group easier, or a vestige of thousands of generations of religious thinking, deep down our automatic position is that most people \u2013 most of the time \u2013 are telling the truth.<\/p>\n
This is a natural inclination that tyrants have understood \u2013 and taken advantage of \u2013 for centuries.<\/p>\n
But however much trust we innately place in others, there\u2019s something we all trust more \u2013 our own eyes.<\/p>\n
We are visual creatures, and once somebody has seen something \u2013 or believes they have seen something \u2013 it is almost impossible to convince them they haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n
And, these days, would-be tyrants can take advantage of that too.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the necessary and primal trust our brains have in our eyes lags behind the ability of technology to confound them.<\/p>\n
Deep Faking is, as most of us know, a video editing trick that can seamlessly replace one face with another. It\u2019s not especially difficult, nor expensive. All you need is the replacee to have a passing superficial resemblance to the replacer, a good number of photos showing different facial positions and the right computer software.<\/p>\n
4chan \u201cs**tposters\u201d do it from the comfort of their own bedrooms for a laugh, replacing porn star faces with those of actresses, celebrities, politicians.<\/p>\n
Simply put, by the very nature of what it is, deep fake technology can make every video showing any face to some degree suspect.<\/p>\n
The potential for fakery doesn\u2019t stop at video, faking audio is getting easier and easier every year. With enough speech samples, voice synthesizers and voice cloners can make anyone say anything. This technology is getting better all the time and can mimic intonation perfectly.<\/p>\n
Artificial Intelligence in general can draw, in seconds, any image you care to describe. It can generate photo-realistic faces that could be used as \u201cvictims\u201d and \u201cmugshots\u201d, or cast any fake drama with fake actors.<\/p>\n
Free online tools can do all of the above passably already. Obviously, governments and mega-corporations would have access to more expensive advanced tools that would probably be near-impossible to detect.<\/p>\n
Hollywood movies deploy CGI to bring dead actors back to life, add modern faces to old news footage, burn cities to the ground or make 60-year-olds look 20 again.<\/p>\n
Let us return to Audrey Hepburn eating a candy bar and examine it afresh.<\/p>\n