Here's a video where I am practicing Chinese.
E. Writer
Genuine Reflections: Out into the void
A few times a year, I force myself into public events as a means of proving that I exist beyond the suffocating walls of digital spaces. Digital, online, virtual, to me represents the unreal. Imagery, that can produce anything it chooses without genuine connection to reality. I learned to distrust it. Thus, it is important to touch grass occasionally, to experience real people, trees, the wind on my face, a snowball, the radiant sun, or moody rain. Events are always lovely, and so are the people I meet...but I am often left with the distinct feeling of disconnection, or standing within range of something quietly vibrating danger--maybe danger is too strong a word, but it is something I cannot readily identify. Perhaps it's intent. This is no one else's fault, this is a unique quirk of my personality, which is why I often strive to challenge it. Perhaps, I have been a writer for too long... too many decades, existing on pages and screens. Nourished by and subsisting only on thoughts and words. That perhaps has become my handicap. The demands of being a writer today requires significantly more than writing the text. It demands physical and digital presence. What I hope to do is exert some control over this reality that I too, am guilty of creating. I am choosing today, to write, and not concern myself with being present for in-person events and to do what feels natural and organic to me. I will also manage a limited digital presence except to release my writings. I yearn for a quiet, serene, writerly life and day-to-day life balance of simple living. So that is what I will focus on maintaining along with my health. Ultimately, I want to slow down.
Darryl Shirley You acknowledge you follow a passion that keeps you engaged in a self-imposed shell or artificial reality - more so now because of the new demands of modernizing and constantly changing "digital society". The digital world is where it's at - people aren't getting information from TV, bookstores, coffee shops, or social group meetings as the post WWII generation did (baby boomers). Nothing wrong with that - you go where the action or need is that utilizes your skill. Stepping out of that bubble to seek human contact demonstrates you haven't lost yourself, and you are human!
E. Writer Indeed. My shell is the reality, but the virtual digital environment i engage in daily, like this one, is the digital reality we've traded for the real physical world 🌎. The digital world can make fake things seem real. Can trick us into believing falsehoods. Or be used to alter reality or deceive us. The world has become an unstable place as a result.
Frank Hutton Thus my continued, regular embrace of the real (physical) world, which isn't subject to belief. That embrace keeps me...(wait for it) grounded.
E. Writer Everyone believes they're not influenced but they are in some form. When we watch the news, the media is creating a narrative about the world. Most people believe it. Remember all of the police shootings in the 2010s? Seemed like there was a new major one every month that made national news. We rarely hear about them now. Remember Qanon? We never hear about it now. News media and social media immediately ceased talking about it in 2020. The reason we don't hear about these things (and this is just one or two examples of the manipulation), is because someone with power is choosing what the public should be angry, frightened, suspicious or excited about. We don't choose what's interesting to us, that's chosen for us. Thays why I disconnected. It's all a manipulation and we are all unwitting participants, whether we agree with this fact or not. Two months ago, every news story was about a certain group going from neighborhood to neighborhood. Suddenly that stream of information stopped. We don't get the news, we get a narrative.
Frank Hutton I don't believe I'll ever believe I know what "everyone" believes.
One of the more creative k-dramas I've watched.
https://www.viki.com/tv/35432c-are-you-human-too#episodes
There is a civil war in Uganda between over 200 CHIMPS. I dislike links to media but felt this is a very neutral story.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr71lkzv49po
What is the simulacra? It is a copy of a copy that replaces the original reference. A photo that comes to represent you, is the simulacra. A video of the image, of you, becomes the copy of the copy. It is simulacra...a simulation and replacement. We are consistently engaged in a pseudo-reality. These are images of me. This is a video of "me." Is it real? Or is it simulacra? Are the pixels on your screen, real?
Or is this the use of simulacra, to explain simulacra.
#reality #philosophy #books
Andrew Morgan I'm certain I read a short story by Flannery O'Connor, I forget the title but the central character is a little girl named Mary Christmas. You won't find the name Mary Christmas anywhere. This story has vanished entirely. Little Mary is only a character, whose life exists only in a few written pages. She is unhappy, brutalized by some old bugger who accompanies her and who summarily strangles her. But in just those few pages, she is brought so vitally to life. I'm not sure anymore whose point of view is portrayed. I think it is the killer's. And the reader is left to mourn for her, to feel deep empathy for her, to feel her loss of being, this fictional character who never made it off a page. Or has she? Does she live in our memory?
E. Writer Thanks for sharing this story. I will definitely find where I can read it. Simulacra is something different. It's when something that is copied replaces the original. An example that Jean Baudrillard mentions in his book is this photo or I think painting of a famous ruin. The ruin is no longer there, but only the image of it remains, and is what people remember. The image has replaced the real, original structure. I constructed this video to demonstrate Simulacra. Its a copy of a copy that is representing me. It is my image, but is not my voice. If I leave this, over time it will replace how I sound amd appear to others by memory.
Darryl Shirley This is scary
E. Writer Hey Darryl! Yes, and it's so convincing. Someone on BP just said to me, "I didn't know you were British." I'm like I'm not. Bit it goes to show how reality can be warped. How anything can replace truth.
Okay, this is creepy. So I did another video using my image. Since I write about simulation, to demonstrate that most of what we see isn't reality but artificial constructs, I put in a prompt, and the prompt was about my book, which deals with these themes. I wrote in it these concerns written in the book. The image begins to generate, then suddenly, it begins typing out these codes in Chinese. As someone you know, I speak Chinese and I can read some Chinese. I am not advanced, but I can hold a conversation and read and understand. But these characters did not make sense to me. So I took it and pasted it in Google. The answer comes up, and asks, where did I find this text? I told it from Google VEO (video generation). It said it was just garbled nonsense. So then, I knew some of these characters meant something, My Chinese is not advanced enough to understand these characters as I've never read them before, so I wrote the following:
me: Oh, then what does this say: 圖像轉影片：模擬現實擔憂
Unlike the garbled glitch text from before, this is a clear Chinese phrase. It translates to:
"Image to Video: Simulating Real-world Concerns"
Here is the breakdown of the terms:
圖像轉影片 (Túxiàng zhuǎn yǐngpiàn): Image to video.
模擬 (Mónǐ): Simulating / Simulation.
現實 (Xiànshí): Reality / Real-world.
擔憂 (Dānyōu): Concerns / Worries.
Why did this appear in your video?
Since you're using Google Veo, this text is likely a leftover from its training data. AI video models are trained on millions of videos, many of which include:
Instructional Overlays: Videos explaining how "Image-to-Video" technology works.
Tech Demos: News segments or presentations discussing "real-world concerns" regarding AI (like deepfakes or safety).
The model essentially "hallucinated" this specific title card because it associated your prompt with technical or realistic AI generation content. You can try translating more snippets with Google Translate if you see other clear characters!
This is creepy. I put my photo into AI to see what a simulation of me would look like, and this is how it envisions my speech and mannerisms. What's odd is that it somehow knows what my teeth are like. Particularly the bottom row, even though I was not smiling in the original pic. It's creepy. See YT video here:
https://youtube.com/shorts/v3fpln3Owj4
#artificialintelligence
