Deepfake: A Brief History of Unreliable Images
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- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2025
- In which John and Hank get Deepfake mustaches, which makes John think about the history of forged, shopped, cropped, and airbrushed images. Can humans learn not to trust their senses? Or are we doomed to be duped by images even when we know they're unreliable?
The incredible deepfake mustache content in this video was made by
Ryan Georgi, who wrote a post to explain the work. ryan.georgi.cc...
Also big thanks as always to Rosianna: / rosianna
CORRECTION: Lenin did not order the photo of Lenin and Trotsky altered. Stalin ordered it. My mistake! Even this video about misinformation contains misinformation.
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John's twitter - / johngreen
Hank's twitter - / hankgreen
Hank's tumblr - / edwardspoonhands
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Somebody tweeted a video of my face on Keanu Reeves the other day. It was a sad experience for all parties involved.
Thanks for watching; I love your videos! -John
Hey Austin!
@@qwertyuoip1234 Hey guys this is Austin
Top 10 anime crossovers
Link plz?
John over here replying to tons of comments probably to fill the void that social media once occupied is honestly really nice
I always try to reply to comments! (But this is a pleasant and thoughtful place for me to be in general, which is very nice and not much like most of my online experiences!) -John
vlogbrothers: Thanks for trying to keep connection alive John 😊❤
I'm the same, RUclips's my only social media (unless couchsurfing counts?)... Wouldn't have it any other way 🌈☀
@@vlogbrothers We too love connecting with you here....and its great that you are also keen to communicate with us.
That Deepfake at the beginning of the video freaked me out so much. I was like, wait... Mustache and Hank on the same person? Wait, wasn't this video a few months ago... and... Ohhhh! It's a Deepfake!
Huh, none of the *vlogbrothers* had mustaches, but then one day, all of them had mustaches. That's weird, I can't think of a time a group has done that.
Ranger Ruby 8
I know! I was like "... is this some really old clip where they both had mustaches? something is very wrong here."
Oddly, the mustaches are really good, but somehow it seems the bot added an odd flicker in John's glasses.
John’s RUclips game has been so strong since quitting social media. Like, I have loved all of his recent videos
Thanks. I should quit twitter more often. -John
vlogbrothers Twitter was always snarky, but since the 2016 election campaign it's become malignant and even metastatic, though. You can log onto Twitter feeling decent and after a few minutes of being exposed to the negativity, you find that you're wanting to sling the poo right back from whence it came. I'm a nobody from nowhere with nothing and I struggled there, I just can't imagine how much crap someone of your amount of fame had to endure. I don't blame you for opting out of that den of drama. I did, too.
I loved all the examples you used in this. Made the whole thing so powerful.
The first superimposed image shows how much John and Hank actually look like each other
yup, i immediately thought of the deepfakes, but i thought they had shopped johns whole face XD
@@schrodingersGinger Yeah to me it looked like they had imposed more elements of John's face than just the moustache. Fake-Hank's nose looked wrong to me. I think Real-Hank's nose is narrower than John's, and Fake-Hank's was too wide to seem realistic.
@@SomeoneBeginingWithI You nailed it. My model was actually trying to put John's whole face onto Hank - it just so happens that I think they look enough alike that it didn't totally look that different!
@@RyanGeorgi That's what I thought, and then I was confused when John said that it was just his moustache.
@@RyanGeorgi I thought that Hank's face looked fuller than usual, and was wondering if he had gained weight.
small correction: Lenin did not remove Trotsky from pictures, that was Stalin ... again
Updated pinned comment. Thanks. -John
@@vlogbrothers There's no pinned comment showing up for me?
@@vlogbrothers What pinned comment?
@@woodfur00 he wrote it in the description
Jake Marchbank looks like deepfakes has gotten to comments too... jk
The first five seconds of this is SO UPSETTING JOHN
Hi John, don't come back to social media... It still sucks.
And it always will.
Don't worry, stx. I'm 0% tempted to participate in the social Internet. I am tempted to observe, but not to participate. -John
@@vlogbrothers A commendable attitude, even though you are still actively participating by being here in the first place.
Tudor Cosmiuc, and your behavior and comment clearly illustrate that this specific part of the social internet is a nice exception and totally worth the involvement.
Every mass medium I’ve removed from my life has improved it immeasurably. The dark truth is that I suspect the same would hold for RUclips.
Throwback to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thinking there were real fairies because those two young girls made a pre-deep fake ‘deep fake’ photo series where they said they played with fairies in the woods but really they were just paper cutouts lmao
Sydney Pugmire honestly I do love this story so much.
ZoeeGrace I find it so funny, he really thought because he wrote Sherlock he was so ready to be a detective 😂
The Original Deepfake. Photo and story for those interested: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
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Hi! Pinned comment with more info and some questions answered: 1. Huge thanks both to Professor Ryan Georgi, who made the mustached deepfake and who talks more about it here: ryan.georgi.cc/2019/02/04/deepfakes-and-public-data/
2. Many of you have asked some version of, "SHOULD WE PANIC?" No, but it's certainly true that disinformative images warp our understanding of reality, and we need to build better systems to protect against that warping. But when information flows freely, what Stalin did with images becomes harder, not easier. I do think that we need to build institutions (and build trust in those institutions) that can help us sort good information from bad, just as we have to build institutions we can trust that will help us to do things we lack expertise in--for example, we have institutions that predict the weather, which is very helpful to those of us who are not meteorologists.
3. Here's the original reunion video the deepfake was built from: ruclips.net/video/jfaFT1_SF6k/видео.html
4. CORRECTION: Lenin did not order the photo of Lenin and Trotsky altered. Stalin ordered it. My mistake! Even this video about misinformation contains misinformation.
Thanks for watching. And thanks for being careful consumers of images.
-John
Thanks so much, John! And thanks for using your platform to talk about this! I don't think any of us know exactly what the right answer is, but I'll also just offer a quick plug for the wonderful work some of the people at the University of Washington are doing to help teach us all how to better confront misinformation and improve our critical thinking: www.washington.edu/strategicplanning/fake-news/
Watching the vlogbrothers grow and change over the last decade or so, I believe it's time that Nerdfighteria has a more nuanced discussion of what "when information flows freely" means. I don't think it flows freely on RUclips. Granted, we're quite privileged considering that there are far worse platforms and points in history, but I know Nerdfighteria is a great candidate to lead a migration toward decentralized platforms that give users and creators agency and ownership over the data they create. I'm so glad this community shares a core value of online skepticism, but I think both you and Hank have done some soul-searching recently, and have been deeply disturbed by RUclips's evolution into a heirarchical information distribution platform that's inseparable from the heirarchical power structure that thrives upon it. Let's brainstorm ideas!
Scarred by the first few seconds of this video.
Scarred by the thumbnail.
Scared in general...
it is 7 41 pm do you know where your children are?
"...or images of you anyway" *Well saved xD*
Always employ healthy skepticism and the humility to admit that you can *and have been* fooled
yeah this is such a good observation. The biggest risk posed by deepfakes is the belief that we are somehow immune to being persuaded by them. -John
While I do enjoy thinking critically about most everything I encounter in life, I also wonder if sometimes it's healthier to _let yourself be fooled_ , depending on the situation, of course. Let the world keep some of its whimsy; whether true or false, if it made you laugh, it matters little. But to those who would deceive us for personal gain and with malificent intent: rue the day your conscience catches up with you, and you remember all those beautiful minds you tricked.
@@vlogbrothers Yes! First step of solving a problem is to be aware of it.
Well said.
Great and thoughtful video! But can I say, as someone who was recently in a car crash and gave that exact "it seemed like it was in a movie" description - I used that to descibe how UNreal it felt. Traumatic experiences cause a disconnect between what we are experiencing and what we are feeling, and at least to me, that disconnect felt like watching a fictionalized version of real events, occuring to someone-that-is-not-me.
I think the quote still has value; the idea that media can feel so real that we use it to describe reality, and it certainly does not disprove the thesis of your video. But perhaps it does not work for trauma, or at least not for those of us growing up so surrounded by media that we see the cracks in the facades and struggle to compare it to the real.
What's worse: The ability to fake anything, or the ability to plausibly claim anything is faked?
Great question. The answer to the second thing is that we ensure against the "plausibly" by building institutions that we can trust that can tell us what kinds of information are and aren't reliable. We're certainly in a moment of declining trust in those institutions, but I'm optimistic that we'll at some point begin trusting expertise again. -John
Thanks, this is even more terrifying than the entire video. I just said this out loud, and my sister just made the deepest sigh I've ever heard
The worst thing is: even unfaked, unbiased, honest results and materials can be skewed and warped in our perception by presentation alone. This is why you must always stop and consider "why", "how", and "what exactly" -- especially if it's about something important.
@@Shrooblord propaganda can be for good cause or for bad causes, it depend entirely on your political agenda. Politic is more about convincing people than discovering truth, truth is mostly academics and non-aligned with any party.
@@vlogbrothers I don't know that I see that working. Justified trust in those institutions is based on those institutions having the habit of basing their claims on evidence. If a fake is indistinguishable from a genuine article, then they can't tell it from a genuine article any better than we can and so if they deserve trust, they won't make definitive claims one way or the other. The only thing they be able to do is provide us with reliable circumstantial evidence, as opposed to baseless claims that would be circumstantial evidence if they were true.
This is all so scary...
It IS scary, but I hoped to emphasize in this video that it also isn't new. What we need to do is build systems that can help us to understand that images we see are not the same as what we see in the real world. I am actually optimistic that we will figure this out, mostly because the consequences of not figuring it out seem very bad. -John
@@vlogbrothers Thank you very much for your answer! I understand that it is nothing completely new but also just the thought that we trust our eyes over everything even if we shouldn't do it just because there is most of the time simply no other option is scary enough...
So I'm gonna try and be as optimistic as you are because as you said, the consequences of not figuring this out would be really bad...
- Pat
@@vlogbrothers Obligatory CaptainDisillusion shoutout:
ruclips.net/user/CaptainDisillusion
Also on the philosophical notion of the simulated more and more standing in for the "real" and the implications of that, Guy Dubord's Society of the Spectacle is pretty interesting/illuminating.
@@Bisquick CaptainDisillusion ftw
Serious props for talking about this, especially the last bit, and not once uttering the word 'Baudrillard'.
Dang good video John. Also, I'm glad to see you're on team Juicy Pear Jelly Belly.
MY DUDE! Your absence from social media has given you a unique insight to the trust we feed our senses in a way that I was NOT prepared for, but super grateful for. I've been hearing and learning more about Deepfakes and the idea of being fooled into believing "fake news" but I am so deep into the social media maelstrom that I couldn't see it already happening with yoga posts and beach bods. That was a very cool video, and those were great insights from Susan Sontag. Thank you for this.
he would be a Ryan ...
Typical Ryan stuff.
I go where I am needed. 🦸🏼♂️
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More like a Ronald
This makes me think of Facetune and other tools. Yes, not as serious as news and history, but I always wonder what we're doing to ourselves like we edit our own images and that makes us dislike our real selves more?
This is a really interesting observation. At some point, if the only images we see/like of ourselves and others are altered images, will we start to believe that reality (and real people) are unattractive/unlikable? OH GOD NOW I AM FREAKED OUT. -John
It’s already a problem. Like with those snap chat filters that subtly airbrush you and make you look better then you go back to your unfiltered face and you’re unhappy with it so you back to the filter. It’s becoming a widespread problem.
vlogbrothers yes, exactly. It becomes unnerving to see what look like without the filters. So you keep using them. If all our images are altered in the future then there may come a time when our only perceptions of each other are distorted and fake and airbrushed.
vlogbrothers there was an article on the guardian news website about cosmetic surgeons saying clients were going in with pictures of themselves with snapchat filters or instagram filters and asking to look like their filtered self. The trend has been called snapchat dysmorphia.
This is the article if you’re interested: www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/08/snapchat-surgery-doctors-report-rise-in-patient-requests-to-look-filtered
@@vlogbrothers sorry about the freaking out, but yeah, I've been thinking about this because I over edited a selfie (like, besides fixing lightning and the usual) and messed with facial proportions. It started fine, but soon I was fixing what I dislike about my face and I saw my "attractive version" in front of me, which freaked me out a lot. Mostly because I truly wanted to look like that
When I experience something and say it feels "like a movie" it's usually because it's something so strange that it crosses into surreal, and the best way my brain can approach it is to compare it to fiction, not because I believe the fiction over the reality. Though I can see the other side, too, I suppose. Either way, technology is blurring the lines between "real" and "artificial" in ways we can only imagine.
Yeah. I've heard people who have experienced heavy violence first hand describe it specifically as "not like in the movies".
I was thinking this too! Or “like a movie” in the sense that the experience felt orchestrated, as if there were a director. Very much the opposite of real life.
I thought this exactly! Should've known someone in the comments would've had the same thought.
It's a thoughtful quote, but in all honesty I too would argue that I only use the phrase "like a movie" when referring to something that did not feel like reality, or to something that seemed so far removed from reality that it felt like something that was thought up for the plot of a movie.
As t4tris said, some have said that a lot of the more "spectacular" thing that happen in movies - like heavy violence, war, vehicle crashes, near-death experiences - aren't anywhere near the same in real life.
This is a great video John!! As a lover of photography it makes me sad that the "a picture speeks a thousand words" idea does not convey that it also speaks a thousand truths. I believe it is in large part why i love natural, non stages photos even more then the "smile, im taking your picture" kind. I like to experience the word, and the people i love in a way that catures it both as it is, as well as how we want it to be. Sometimes i will take a scenic photo twice, once as my eye sees it in the moment ( ie. Power lines, litter, people ect.) And a 2nd time zoomed and cropped as i qould like it to be. It puts a lot of perspective in things. Even when i shoot portraits, i never delete the unedited image, they are usually the ones i love the most. Its a good reminder of what is real, and what is tangible. Thank you for pointing outt something that many of us look blindly on though! Perspective is so important!
That video freaked me out.. First hank had a mustache.. Then it looked like John's face on Hank, which made me realize that you actually look very much alike. Something I never gave much thought. Even after watching you for.. What.. 9 years now.
Good eye! The model I made is actually mapping John's entire face to Hank… but they do look so much alike that honestly, I can't tell that it's not Hank's face!
@@RyanGeorgi it's awesome.. And creepy as hell! It makes me question the way I see people though.
I have to look extra carefully at my friends and family next time I see them.. What if I've never truly seen them, but just created an image of what I think they look like, and then my brain superimpose it onto their faces. Do I even know my own face..?
that last quote is a little odd though, surley people say "it felt like a movie" because a situation was _unreal_ , so spectacular that it felt setup like a shot in a movie
aL3891 That’s what I was thinking
I don’t understand how every single week these videos make me smile AND laugh AND learn AND think. this is such a wonderful corner of the internet.
Me and my bestie recently admited to both having days where we look outside and go "Wow, the graphics are great" life is weird.
I fundamentally disagree with the statement that people compare extreme events to movies to make them sound “more real”. Typically it’s just the opposite. Most of us have never been in and never thought we would be in a plane crash so if we are it suddenly seems jarringly out of place as if it isn’t real, like a movie.
whoa, this was an insightful four minutes. I like how I go away from a lot of your recent videos feeling like I am a better person than I was before I watched it
I liked how it talked about we live in a cropped, posed, and edited world. And the line, "We need to learn to live in a world where we can't trust our eyes." The more you think about it the deeper that quote becomes. Love how these videos always challenge my way of looking at the world.
Ok, I have said the phrase "It felt like I was in a movie." but it was not to convey how "real" it was but how "surreal" it was. The kind of event that simply doesn't happen to your average person more than once or twice in their entire lives, if ever.
Photography (and live-action video) are always interesting to me, because they toe such a line between documenting reality and creating reality. Honestly, even the simple act of framing a shot changes what we're seeing, and that doesn't even begin to consider what things like simple cuts can do-after all, I'm guessing you had more than 4 minutes of footage that you selected the best takes from in order to provide us with the illusion of cohesion and perfection.
I just started reading ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ yesterday, hoping to finish it on the train today (it’s a short book) as per John’s recommendation, so this was good timing!
Would be keen for a podcast or something with more of John’s thoughts on the book... hint hint pretty please? 😜
Thank you for making this video. After watching Shane's most recent video covering deep fakes, I got really anxious, thinking "how can we truly trust anything without seeing it in person now?"
I suppose things will just continue going as they've been going, where most evidence is real, but there's always going to be some fake proof of something or another
I think the answer is that we have to build trust in institutions. It just doesn't work to be like, "I can figure out for myself if this is a deepfake." That hasn't ever REALLY worked, and it certainly won't work in the coming deepfake future. But if we have information sources we can build trust in, then they will do the work of sourcing material.
We already have to trust experts in lots of ways. None of us can be experts in everything, and so to navigate the world effectively, we need to build trust in different institutions. (I cannot predict the weather, for instance, but I trust that certain weather apps can predict the weather, so I know whether to bring an umbrella to work in the morning.) -John
For me, it seems like the more I trust big(er) companies, the more they tend to screw me over (Facebook listening in to our conversations to advertise to us more effectively, iPhones letting other people calling us hear our conversations before we accept, etc etc)
I agree with you though, it's important that we're able to trust in the experts again. I think what really struck me is that most of the areas in which I have what I'll call trust issues, is technology, which is why this affected me so badly. It's always evolving, and one slip up can cause so much damage
@@TheThreeMusketeers09 I don't think he was talking about trusting companies who profit from altering your perception. Either way it feels like people are going to trust whatever aligns with their world view
In the process of electing experts to decide what IS true or a forgery, we must be careful not to appoint people with incentive to decide what SHOULD be truth or lies.
@@In_Space TheThreeMusketeers09 indeed: I believe John's point was more to appoint and/or put more faith into independent, non-profit organisations governed by a body of experts with data pulled and cross-referenced from all over the place ---- try and make things as unbiased, uncorruptable and unaltered as possible. Of course, in the end, we can't put blind faith in anyone if we want to know the truth -- we can't even always blindly follow our own hearts, and _they_ should be the _one_ we can put _all_ our trust in (and, as a matter of fact, I personally do). That said, we can try and make trusting "outsiders" as easy as possible by taking care with how we select the body of information we expose ourselves to, and always keep remembering what _their_ intentions might be presenting _us_ with that information.
Wow, Im sure glad I clicked on this video. Really deep. Funny to think that I came here only for the moustached brothers LOL
That last quote has its facts wrong. "It felt like I was in a movie" is how people commonly describe the experience of derealisation, which is when something feels UNREAL. It's very common when you're having a traumatic or otherwise extremely stressful experience. Other ways to describe the same phenomenon is feeling like there is a disconnection between oneself and reality, or that reality feels fake. So even though I think you're right that it's hard for us to see something and not believe it, we're very used to thinking of movies as unreal.
I agree with most of this video. But i would say " was like a movie" can be more of a disconnect from trauma. Sometimes disassociating feels like your watching something happening that seems unreal. Comparing it to a movie is just a good way *in my opinion* to relate to others how it feels, not necessarily a commentary on photos itself. But still love this content.
(About the quote on minute 3:34) I also am the kind of person that will describe such an experience as "movie-like", but don't agree that we do so as a way of trying to describe how real it felt but rather to explain how surreal it was, like it was so strange or extreme that you would only expect to see it in a movie.
Hi everyone. Artificial intelligence PhD student here. It's so cool to see this video now since I just attended a conference where this was the subject of a major talk. Couple of things I wanted to say:
- This technology is called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for anyone interested in learning more. Basically, it's a system of two models that are played off against each other to perform better and better at these tasks.
- I'm incredibly happy to see this video. When asked the expert who gave the talk (the dude who invented GANs) said that the most effective way to make sure this isn't used for evil is to train people to not just blindly trust images. Both videos like these and the application you used are very helpful for that, so thank you. There is also good news, however. I have heard that printed and written letters used to be admissible in court because they were deemed to be too hard to reproduce (I don't have a source for this, so might not be true. Sorry, I'm a bad scientist I know), so there is hope that we can retrain society to not just blindly trust everything. It's gonna take work and time though.
- I also want to mention that this technology also has good applications. For example, it can be used to make a lot of statistical models more robust which can have a lot of impact on computer vision, fraud detection, and other security applications, so it's not all bad!
- On the subject of airbrushing people out of pictures, there's an AI for that as well now: deepangel.media.mit.edu/
- Conclusion: The technology can be scary, but also good, and seeing the amount of research going on in that field, it's not going anywhere. Be critical of the images you see, as you should be with other information on the internet (also see ruclips.net/video/L4aNmdL3Hr0/видео.html, by Green et al.) The point about the progression of this technology is incredibly true. I and other researchers are doing what we can to find ways to help people tell what to look for, but it never hurts to be educated.
I'll be happy to answer questions if anyone has them :) again thanks for a wonderful video!
Hi, Sam! Quick sidenote - GANs are one method used for deepfakes, and computer vision is one of many domains in which GANs are used (they're also used in Natural Language Processing, which is my field of expertise). The faces in this video were actually created with a simpler autoencoder (also called encoder-decoder) model. Surprisingly, in the (unscientific) evaluation in playing with these models for the video, I found that the particular GAN implementation used looked worse! (Though this maybe has to do with the exact ways in which the discriminator in the code was designed, rather than the algorithm itself). Good luck with your studies, happy to see more students interested in ethics and critical thinking!
Thanks, Ryan. I didn't want to make it sounds like GANs were by only means the only way this was done, or used for this exclusively. I should have phrased that better. I didn't actually know that autoencoders could also do this, though I can vaguely imagine how that would work. Thanks for the comment :)
Of course! Always happy to see other academics doing science communication. It's hard to find ways to explain the tech that is accessible, yet accurate! (I'm sure I'll get plenty of responses to my own article on things I missed shortly!)
A Masterclass advertisement popped on at the end of this video, with the caption "Don't imitate real people" and tripped me right out
AH I LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH! ❤️ Thank you for being so awesome!
Wait... Are you telling me the photos of the Loch ness monster might be faked??? I'M OUTRAGED!
Of all the deep fakes, Nessie is real.
John, As a person who had to evacuate Boston because a transformer was leaking gas, when I say something feels like a movie it isn't too say it felt real. It's to say this is something I never thought I would go through. Something you usually only see in movies. Something I thought wasn't possible or real.
just got a whole book that compiled all the stalin edits this week, very normal and cool birthday gift. brb googling the gang of four.
Magnificent material for my Photography classes at uni in Colombia. Many thanks, John.
I did not realise how difficult it is to distrust what you see before I tried VR. I can hear you telling me that I am running into a wall, Alex, but I can clearly see that the room expands and that to pet the cute robot puppy, and must keep going.
Thank goodness, thought I was stroking out for a second.
Whenever the lights flicker in a room, I ask my wife, "Did the lighting change or am I having a stroke?" -John
Thanks for talking about this, John. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, it is a very scary thing to me.
I am not satisfied with 4 minutes. This was really an eye opening experience. Thank you!
Also!! Victorian women had basically white out over part of their waists! Most women did NOT tight lace and most women who did, did NOT look wasp waisted; most people didn’t wear them long enough (decades) and tightly enough (the edge of passing out) to physically make their waists as tremor as they looked, and some of the fakes are so small it’s not even physically possible! I hate how corsets have that stereotype, largely based off of somewhat exaggerated accounts from novels or the fake photos. It was a fad for a short time, really short compared to the length of time people wore corsets. Just because we didn’t have photoshop back then doesn’t mean all photos were untouched.
What bothers me is, when deepfakes do catch up, how will we know what’s fake? Do we have software to be able to run to recognize it easily? How will we do this? Will we just be listening to opposing news stations, some asserting clips are real and some asserting they are deep fakes? I can see that being problematic. We’re already getting really good at arguing over facts but I think this will take it to another level.
The sentiment of "it was like I was in a movie" - especially in the given context - seems to suggest more the disconnect a person feels in such experiences. Watching it, but not a part of it.
Fascinating! You have me thinking about how we may compare things that cannot seem real more to the feelings we have about reality than the actual reality, which is why we use the movie phrase. It's the intensity of the feeling of a story we are tying to the feelings we have about reality, until they seem to blur. The feelings are similar even when our eyes are fooled.
Omg love that John Green references Susan Sontag because I just read her article “Against Interpretation” in my contemporary art class
This was absolutely fascinating, and so well presented. Thank you for the food for thought.
It is intriguing, and somewhat exciting, and equal parts worrying, that -- soon -- we shall have to question literally everything we see and hear, even more so than already is the case. A great day for developing critically thinking minds! A sad day for those who are easily convinced by "evidence".
alright this video doesn’t have the regular dose of John’s optimism and I don’t know what to do - normally when John delivers upsetting news he has some nuanced and oddly happy take on it. Today, it’s terror all the way down
Terror All the Way Down: available for pre-order now. Link in the doobly doo.
Shrooblord +
Wow the clip on the homepage got me way to exited for a reunion video. You got me.
In what feels like the neverending chaos of the world right now, this small corner of the internet has been my favorite. Thanks for reminding me there really is nothing new, and we're going to figure out ways to traverse these weird times together. I'm so happy to be a part of Nerdfighteria. On a side note- Hank, never grow a mustache.
best way to start a video about deepfakes: a deepfake
Triple stache if you include hanks face, your face, and hanks pizzamas shirt
That was definitely superimposing more than just your mustache, unless you and Hank happen to have near-identical glasses.
It's so fun to me that you quote Susan Sontag in this video because just this week I read her Illness as Metaphor (since it was assigned to me by my lit and medicine class).
Though I never had any idea who she was until this week, I probably heard her quoted all the time, and now these quotes have more weight to me!!
I know this doesn't have anything to do with the video, but it's just so fun to know stuff 😂 those quotes would've had no context to me before - the more I know, the more I learn!
I just watched a video of John from 2011 and holy CRAP I forgot how fast you used to talk. Age has mellowed the puffiness of not just the physical puff but the emotional puff
To speak on that last quote from Sontag about life events feeling like movies, I think it has something to do with the order in which we experience these things. If we see a movie about a car crash before we ourselves are in a car crash, there's nothing else closer to compare our car crash to especially when proper research is done for the movie. Another less drastic example: I grew up going to Disneyland where a lot of the buildings in Fantasyland are based on quaint European architecture. When I went to Europe and saw those examples of that style of architecture firsthand, I kept thinking how similar it all looked to the buildings at Disneyland. I saw the copy before the source material and then compared the two because the copy was really good.
I disagree with one point. Generally when I have heard people describe things as being 'like a movie' or 'like something out of a movie' they are describing a fantastical thing and/or a vivid sense of disconnect from reality. Like they couldn't in fact believe their eyes or were experiencing some kind of dissociation from the situation.
Why do I keep rewatching the first few seconds? It hurts me every time, but I just can't stop...
That's an odd interpretation of "it felt like a movie." That sounds to me like a description of how unreal it felt; a realisation of something that you previously thought to only be fiction.
I found the section about the staged news photos really interesting. As a journalism student, I've been taught that staging shots is unethical, but what's interesting is most of these photos (especially the civil war photos), were taken before a code of ethics was developed for visual journalism because the technology was so new. It's fascinating to see how ethical standards change over time as technology develops. In fact, we're seeing it in action today with social media!
I disagree with that last bit about saying “it seemed like a movie” meaning that it seemed very real... I think that means that it seemed very fake, or at least very distant. It seemed like you were sitting somewhere watching the event happening on a screen rather than actually participating. I’ve felt that feeling when I worked with kindergarteners and one of the kids stopped breathing. Even though I was right next to him the entire time, it felt like I had moved over to the side of the room and was silently watching everything that happened. The kid ended up being ok, btw, but it was a scary few minutes.
Very good point John. Now even videos are unreliable. What you forgot to mention is that videos are unreliable even back then in 2007. What I'm saying is give me back my face John. It's been almost two decades. I can't get out of the house ever since.
God damn. I love Vlog brothers videos. The intellectual commentary is just.... so very good.
The thumbnail genuinely scared me. I hold you responsible for the emotional damage.
I find that thumbnail deeply disturbing on a cellular level
“First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is“ - Donovan Leitch
One of the most interesting things I ever learned about in school was hyper-reality. It's basically this idea that films/tv/etc. are meant to reflect the "real world" but that we then have expectations for the real world that are based off movies, which is... based off reality, which means it isn't reality. It's like putting two mirrors face to face. Which mirror is reflecting which mirror? This video reminds me a lot of that concept.
I always took "seemed like a movie" as an expression of how _surreal_ an event was. It felt like something staged or over the top. Something that couldn't / wouldn't happen in real life.
I’ve always taken “it was like a movie” as an expression of simple disbelief. That Sontag quote is peeling my brain like an onion right now.
Thank you for highlighting this to me, it's something that I know, but don't think about often enough
Like my mom has told me numerous times, "Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see."
Watching Shane's video about this terrified me a little, but not quite as much as Hank with John's face. Some lines shouldn't be crossed.
Reminds me a bit of the whole Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the fairies thing. Or rather, the point in time in history where the camera was new enough that people believed it could only show the unadulterated truth.
I had a history of photography class in college and we had many discussions about the inherent "truthfulness" of photographs. People have been editing photographs even when the only technology available was physically cutting the paper and pasting it on another image. This was as far back in the civil war. I also remember this one photograph taken by Arthur Rothstein of a skull that was moved 5 feet from where it was on a patch of grass onto desert land during the Dust Bowl. While it was true that the land was covered in desert, it was also a staged photograph because it was found on a patch of grass.
Great video John. When I was a child I struggled with a concept: I found it difficult to conceive that sometimes things seen in a movie could happen in reality. Sometimes I still do. For me everything I saw in a movie was fake. So even a simple thing, for example a depiction of a kiss, was not possible to exist in the real world, like I saw it on tv. For me reality and fiction had always been kind of intertwined.
The still-image used as the cover photo of the video (terminology escapes me at this hour) is horrendously unsettling to me. Just imagining John Green’s face merged with Nic Cage’s face is bringing plenty enough discomfort for the entire year.
Whatever you see on Friday, it will definitely not be a pipe.
I always assumed "it seemed like a movie" was used to illustrate how UNREAL the situation was, that when they were in the situation they felt that it couldn't possibly be real.
saying it was like a movie doesn't mean it seemed real, it means it felt like you were watching it and not directly experiencing it.
John on Friday: "Ceci n'est pas un Hank."
I understood that reference.
Interesting. I’ve only used the term “it seemed like a movie” to describe how surreal or fictional an event felt
Okay but by pure chance I watched this immediately after the actual video from 2018 of you and hank (sans-stache) and was thoroughly frightened
I don't usually find "uncanny valley" disturbing, but that thumbnail of nick cage superimposed onto John seriously freaked me out. I don't think you could have done better if you had made it a jumpscare image. I can't be the only one who responded this way.
But I would argue that people say a real life event "Seemed like a movie," not because it felt real, but because it felt like something that could only happen in the movies.
Vlogbrothers suggests premises for Black Mirror episodes...
Thanks, John! Thought provoking, as always...
I've always disagreed with the interpretation by Sontag in your last quote. People do not describe such experiences as 'being like a movie' to explain their reality but rather to describe those experiences as UNreal, that those violent moments so distinct in pace and consequence from our daily lives seem surreal enough not be believed in the same way.
Well spoken. It brings me enjoiment to hear the last part of this video. Good choise of words.
As we adjust to being sceptical of how stories originally appear, we mustn't fall into a state of believing the words of the second story-teller that approaches us. Just like we must scrutinise the stories which fit closest to what we want to believe, we also must scrutinise those that come to us congratulating us for being suspicious in the first place.
The recent news story about a clash between a Native American demonstration, children from an all-boys school, and some Black Hebrew Israelites were depressing for a multitude of reasons but I found the way the agreed-upon narrative of the events changed to be darkly fascinating. People were so used to original images being chosen to trick them that they searched for further information only to stop at the first credible alternative. Obviously, the truth was more complex and ambiguous, but I was so shocked how quickly people changed from defiant disbelief at the first story to sudden acceptance of the second. We must be wary of those praying on a need to feel vindicated in our suspicions to sway us to their preferred angle. There was so much information floating around (many conflicting others or putting them in different contexts), it's depressing to know how much the order of their reveal changed the ultimate narrative that took over.
hank with a mustache was deeply scarring. i will never recover, thank you john
I wish this would have been a longer video, as it’s educational enough to be exempt from the 4:00 rule. Way to play it safe, John!
When I say “it seemed like a movie” it’s bc either the things that were occurring seemed so unbelievable it was like something out of a movie, or that I, in that moment, was out of touch with the reality of it all and the real life experience didn’t seem to be real at all but like the world around me was put on play and I was just a spectator, absent from the time and place everything was actually occurring.
I'd never heard the word deepfake before, that's neat, and also that beginning was creepy af for possibilities.