Tag: Media

Synthetic media: be as afraid as you ever were

Synthetic media is a term I’d not come across before hearing about Google’s paper on fighting disinformation that was published this week. It describes those eerily realistic images and video generated through artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) techniques.

You might have seen the video of the Jennifer Lawrence press conference where she has been gifted Steve Buscemi’s face as an example of this.

Image result for jennifer lawrence / steve buscemi

Deep fakes are what we more commonly call these.

Google says it is sharing datasets of synthetic media so that others can use it to spot deep fakes and develop systems that can do this. However it admits that there are limits to what tech can do – always slightly galling for a tech giant – and says it will need to also work with “researchers, policymakers, civil society, and journalists around the world”. Although none of these watchdogs have enjoyed complete success dealing with disinformation generated by non-silicon based actors, to coin a phrase. This last ditch defence against the tidal waver of fakes has been breached many times before.

Check your anti-tech moral panic

While we are trembling at the prospect of future synthetic media horrors, we might also recall that manipulating and misleading through media is something humans have been doing without support from AI for as long as we care to recall. See The Daily Mail and other tabloids in the UK’s decades-long campaign of disinformation about the European Union, for an example of this.

The Economist recently provided a helpful infographic of disinformation spread by the British media since the early 90s, sadly including stories published by non-tabloids such as the BBC and The Times.

Source: The Economist

The eyes! The eyes!

Another deep fake demo that crossed my awareness this week was a website called This Person Does Not Exist, which claims to showcase images of human faces that have been generated by an algorithm, something that previously had been hard to achieve.

Hit refresh and another fake face pops up. Obviously helped by foreknowledge, I thought that many of these would bear up to a glance, but still teetered on the edge of the uncanny valley.

The giveaway – when there is one – always seems to be the eyes. Sometimes more obviously than others…

Although other things can go wrong too…

I’m not sure about the provenance of this website. I’m aware that I may be enjoying it because it plays on whatever cognitive biases I have that make me want to believe that machines will never be able to completely fool me. In fact, they probably already have.

Having a vision when you can’t see where you’re going

Buzzfeed’s a company I follow as closely as I can – for a couple of reasons. It’s understood content and the Web better than any other media organisation (“sharing is distribution ”) and also it is constantly having to reinvent itself as the Web evolves.

On Friday, CEO Jonas Perretti publicly posted a letter to his company:

During the explosive growth of the past year, it’s been easy to lose sight of the big picture. We don’t have an existing model to copy, because we are building something that has never existed before and wasn’t even possible before social networks and smartphones became the primary way people consume news and entertainment around the world.

The post goes on to calibrate the company’s vision as a “cross-platform global network” for media. That Buzzfeed’s vision and identity changes over time is a strength – more than many CEOs Perretti acknowledges uncertainty about their destination and the route they’ll take.

   

Connecting some dots around social, earned and satisfaction

Working through the connections between these things…

…Oliver Blanchard says:

If you treat earned media like paid media long enough, you will teach it to act like paid media.

…This is connected with the idea we explored that editors should be in charge of paid digital media (or at least have control of their own budgets) m- treating paid like earned could be a lot more useful than the other way around.

…It’s another angle on what John Willshire discusses in his series of presentations on the idea of “fracking the social web“. The race for Likes and shares and and views leaves depleted culture and relationships in its wake.

…Andy Whitlock says in this deck that creating noise (chasing attention) isn’t always the best approach. Platforms and products are ways of creating long term value, long term relationships, he says.

…This connects with why at Brilliant Noise we’ve talked more about earning advocacy than earning media, or even earning attention. The media’s not the point, the customer is… and they couldn’t give a fig for brands, most of the time.

Which also reminds me of an interesting Twitter conversation yesterday between Mat Morrison, Jon and Professor Byron about brands and satisfaction:

 

Hat tip to Anne McCrossan for pointing me to the Oliver Blanchard article.

Google’s “Yay” vs. Twitter’s nuanced view

A Broadstuff post about the Summly acquisition by Yahoo! looks at the story as a test for how well Google works as a search engine vs. Twitter. 

Now, Google works better than anything out there if you know what it is you want to find, but Twitter, Broadstuff asserts, is where you go to understand what’s really going on… 

Read Google, and you’d barely know anything about Summly because the first 7 pages comprise of press regurgitation and it has utterly failed at telling you anything useful about it….

…But search Twitter, and you get a totally different story. Twitter, despite a reputation for being celebrity and inanity obsessed, is in fact – on the basis of my search anyway, far less so than Google. What is certain is that Twitter gave me a far fuller picture, within the first page I got, and, in this case anyway was the better search engine by far.

The whole media world optimises for Google, it goes on to say, which is making it less useful.

Metered media

Kevin Anderson looks at the online paid media landscape and says one business model is emerging as a leader:

Metered – This model allows casual readers to read some content for free, but then asks readers to pay after they have read their monthly allowance. This is the model the Financial Times has used for years, and this was the model that the New York Times chose.

This works for me as a user or reader.

Every now and again I have a subscription cull when I realise I am paying for too many things I am not reading or using enough. Metered models mean you end up paying when you realise you really are getting value from a particular site or service.

Media needs its architects

At the Edinburgh International TV Festival last month, Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, told delegates to “ignore Lord Sugar” and bring more engineers, more science, into the TV industry. This was essential, he argued, if they wanted to break the pattern of UK innovating things that would be scaled up into global businesses elsewhere.

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Optimising for attention: what media and marketing need to focus on in 2011

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Here’s a prediction for you (why not, it is New Year’s day).

In 2011, media and marketing will move beyond optimising for platforms and start optimising for attention.

Following a thread of thinking prompted by Sam Michel’s comment earlier on today, I came back to the thing about our repeated mistake of focusing on platforms instead of the things that matter (outcomes, patterns, trends, consequences, behaviours).

Search engine optimisation (SEO), social media, display ads, PR, creative, content, all of these things are too often presented in oppoisition to one another, when really all distract from the central task in hand, winning in the great attention markets of the web.

The only disciplines I wouldn’t include in those would be things would be user experience and community management, both of which, when practised with awareness of networks rather than fixating on a single website or platform, are growing in importance in the digital mix. It amazed me that toward the end of 2010 we were still talking about the relative merits of PR and SEO, as if effective communications

Let’s not waste too much time on playground tactics (no rabbit in a hat tricks) in 2011. Begin and end your thinking about success online with attention: serving it, winning it, earning it.

And with that, here’s some 12 year old hip hop to kick off the New Year. Keep it, er, real…

Blogs become mainstream media

In the hype-sphere the chatter is all about Foursquare and Facebook: blogging doesn’t get much of a mention.

While I still prize blogging as a form of personal media and a networked productivity and knowledge tool, its clear to see that blogs as a media format are mature and in the mainstream.

Two posts I read recently spoke of this. First, in her analysis of Google’s launch of Boutiques.com (well worth a read in itself), iCrossing journalist Jo-Ann Fortune points out that alongside fashion celebrities, the company brought on board fashion bloggers:

…Google has enlisted the help of style icon celebrities such as Olivia Palermo, the Olsen twins and Carey Mulligan and fashion bloggers including Jane of Sea of Shoes, Alix, aka The Cherry Blossom Girl and Susie Lau from London-based Style Bubble, to tell that story. These taste-shapers ‘curate’ their own boutiques, based on their favourite pieces as well as their personal style – the sum of their preferred designers, shapes, patterns and styles-, allowing those inspired by their style to join them on a virtual shopping spree.

The inclusion of fashion bloggers alongside the ‘traditional’ celebrities just goes to show how far this new breed of public personality has come. Stylist.co.uk this week disclosed how three female fashion, beauty and celebrity bloggers make between 35k and 80k a year each, revealing that the brand they build from their blog is worth much more than the blog itself.

And Reed’s blogging expert, Adam Tinworth, points to some marketing by Microsoft for its new phone as evidence of blogs in the mainstream (“another tipping point” as he puts it).

A quote. On a huge advert. In one of the mainline commuter stations. In one of the biggest cities in the world.

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As a media format blogs are still as potentially disruptive as they ever where, but some of them are firmly part of the established media landscape now…

May Day in Albion: will future historians declare the 2010 election for social media and the people?

How will future historians look back at the UK election of 2010?

We don’t know, of course, but the primary sources will be more than the letters between politicians, the newspaper reports and memoirs of the politicians. They will probably use the data-mining skills that will be commonplace then, possibly refined for the academic researcher to carry out information archaeology on the Tweets, emails and Facebook messages that survive from the rest of us.

Continue reading May Day in Albion: will future historians declare the 2010 election for social media and the people?

iPad first impressions

iCrossing UK colleagues falling for the iPad (via @shortlisted)

Like most of the world, it seemed, I was perfectly prepared to offer an opinion on the iPad without having ever seen one. Like most of the pre-launch “analysis” I’m not sure I added much of value to the discussion around it, other than to caution that we will have to wait and see what its real impact would be.

Apple’s newest product became a kind of proxy war for all sorts of other interests: DRM, death/survival of publishing, Mac v PC (yawn) etc etc. Cory Doctorow’s discussion of why we should not buy iPads was both typical of this slew of writing and stand out brilliant. It got me thinking, it made me hesitate for a moment about buying one…

Now? Reader, I bought one. And all the hypotheticals fell away, and it became about being a user – and that’s a whole different matter…

Continue reading iPad first impressions