Who Woulda Thunk

Exit: books. Enter: thunks.

Or so says Peter Wang, PyScript inventor and the cofounder and CEO of the open-source Python platform Anaconda. In a recent post to Twitter-formerly-X, Wang offered a bold vision — or maybe an incredibly bleak one, depending on your point of view — of humanity's literary future. Rather than publish books, Wang predicted, humanity will soon begin to publish inventions dubbed "thunks," which he describes as "nuggets of thought that can interact with the 'reader' in a dynamic and multimedia way."

"There can still be a classic linear 'passive read mode,'" the developer added, "but that can be autogenerated based on the recipient's level of existing context and knowledge."

In other words? It seems that according to Wang, gone are the days of humanity expressing its creativity, engaging in the quest for understanding, and fulfilling our need to catalog our existence through the thousands-year-old tradition of literature. Instead, all we'll do is think a little thunk, and allow AI to generate a multimedia choose-your-own-adventure experience.

Altmanism 101

While such an invention might offer a degree of entertainment, it's hard to imagine that these "thunks," as described, would be a passable replacement for books. After all, if you're doing it well, reading is far from a "passive" act, as Wang suggests in his X post. Not only is the act of writing creative, but the act of reading is creative as well: without visual or other sensory stimulations, our mind is forced to fill in the visual blanks, stirring our imaginations and sense of wonder, and sometimes provoking profound insights in the process.

What really makes Wang's "thunk" vision notable, however, is how clearly it depicts what seems to be a commonly-held belief system among the broader AI community regarding humanity's relationship to creativity.

There's a certain Sam Altman-like sensibility to Wang's theory that these imagined creations would oust books from their place in human culture and society. The idea that AI could replace that in lieu of gamified, autogenerated content — which, lest not forget, is always a regurgitation of human-made material — isn't only depressing, but feels representative of the "all human-made creative output is just recapitulated iterations of all of the creative material that came before it" theory present among many an AI Guy's logic.

From image generators to thunks, at the heart of the generative AI industry lie deeply consequential questions concerning how human labor, creative labor included, is valued. If autogenerated thunks really are the future, the answer, sadly, seems to be "not so much."

More on thunk inspo: BuzzFeed Says AI Will “Replace the Majority of Static Content”

The post Tech Guy Says Books Will Be Replaced by AI-Powered “Thunks” appeared first on Futurism.

“If there was a fire in that building over there, and me and twenty other people are on the top floor, I’d get out and they wouldn’t. I only got one leg, but it’s a god damn good sexy leg I’ll tell you that. It’s a sexy ass fucking leg. It’s sexy. It’s sexy as fuck. I’m telling you the truth. This shit is god damn sexy. I don’t have to explain it. It explains itself. Tell him why you’re sexy, leg.”

We're in Hell

Just when you think reality TV can't stoop any lower, it does it yet again. To wit: in fresh new manmade horror, a Netflix reality show called "Falso Amor," which translates to "Deep Fake Love," splits five real-life couples up into two different houses, adds a bunch of hot singles to the mix, and then subjects individuals to the experience of watching their partner cheat on them in videos that may or may not be deepfaked.

Yes, seriously, and from the streaming service that brought you "Black Mirror." The Spanish-language program asks participants to watch the cheating clips, many of which are just convincing fakes. Participants then have to guess whether the videos are real or cooked up by the AI. At the end of the show, the couple who guesses correctly more than anyone else wins 100,000 euros (that's about $110,000 in US dollars) because this is the world we now live in.

Obviously, this premise is a dystopian nightmare — as Platformer's Casey Newton put it on The New York Times' Hard Fork podcast, "God does not exist in the universe of 'Deep Fake Love'" — and we would not wish this psychological torture on anyone.

Ethic With Drama

In another particularly dark turn, per Decider, part of the premise of the show is that the couples didn't actually know that they would be subjected to the deepfaked clips.

Not to get all high and mighty about bad reality television, but there are some serious moral and ethical ambiguities here. This is a burgeoning technology, and while in some cases it's been used for absurd fun, it's most often used for abusive purposes — scams, misinformation, and perhaps most insidiously, inserting real people into porn without their consent. It could be argued, as the Hard Fork hosts did, that mainstreaming the tech for the bizarre premise of "Deep Fake Love" might normalize a potentially dangerous tech before we understand the breadth of impact.

And to that end, there's still very little in the way of research regarding the psychological impact of deepfakes. Whatever deepfake tech the show's creators are using is incredibly convincing, and we can imagine that the clips could have a lasting mental and emotional impact; what exactly those impacts might be, however, and how long they might stick around, is unclear.

It's safe to say that folks on Twitter had their misgivings as well.

"I knew the AI shit was gonna be wild but watching this show 'Deep Fake Love' is really putting things into perspective," tweeted one netizen. "You're not even going to even be able to believe your eyes after a while cause of deep fakes getting better."

More on deepfakes: Reality Is Melting as Lawyers Claim Real Videos Are Deepfakes

The post Deranged Reality TV Show Psychologically Tortures Participants by Showing Them Deepfakes of Their Partners Cheating appeared first on Futurism.

Stranger things have happened, but this one conspiracy theory might actually be true. Alex Goldman, the former host of the once-heralded, now-defunct podcast Reply All, may have just cracked the code on whether Disney replaced the skin of a Hillary Clinton robot with that of Donald Trump.

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