Digital Worlds – Distorted Reality

Via the Inforrm blog (The International Forum for Responsible Media), I note a post from Siwei Li on Deepfakes leveled up in 2025: here’s what’s coming next:

For many everyday scenarios — especially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social media platforms — their realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert viewers. In practical terms, synthetic media have become indistinguishable from authentic recordings for ordinary people and, in some cases, even for institutions.

It’s getting on for 10 years or so now since I was regularly posting here, and back then I was interested not so much in virtual reality or simulated worlds such as the (already by then) largely defunct creations such as Second Life, as in alternate and augmented realities.

Ten years on, and the web itself is becoming an alternate reality. A rich media ecosystem where it is becoming impossible to distinguish media that has been created from media that is intrnded to be a faithful visual or audio recording of physical reality.

And even if we do attempt to take a “real” photograph, or video clip, technology increasingly “helps” modify the image to make it “better”: colours are modified, background features can be erased, multiple images are taken and from some algorithmic determination the “best” is selected, or a compound final image created from the several samples.

I note the subheader from this blog: Descending into a nightmare… Welcome to it.