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SUMMARY:Ways of worldfaking - Boaz Miller (Zefat Academic College)
DTSTART:20211201T130000Z
DTEND:20211201T143000Z
UID:TALK165328@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Matt Farr
DESCRIPTION:Deepfakes\, namely\, algorithmically created realistic images 
 and ‎videos that make it appear as if people did something they didn't\,
  undermine our fundamental epistemic standards and practices. Yet the natu
 re of the epistemic threat they pose remains elusive. After all\, fictiona
 l or distorted representations of reality are as old as cinema. Existing a
 ccounts of technology as extending the senses (Humphreys 2004)\, mediating
  between subjects and the world (Verbeek 2011)\, or translating between ac
 tants (Latour 2005) cannot characterize this threat. Existing concrete acc
 ounts of the threat of deepfakes by social epistemologists such as Regina 
 Rini (2020) and Don Fallis (2020) fall short of their target.\n\nEmploying
  the notions of artifact affordance and technological possibility (Record 
 2013\; Davis 2020)\, I argue that the epistemic threat of deepfakes (and C
 GI more generally) is that for the first time they afford ordinary compute
 r users the practicable possibility to fairly cheaply and effortlessly mak
 e fictional worlds indistinguishable from the real world. Normatively\, a 
 deepfake is epistemically malignant when (1) a reasonable person is misled
  to believe that the fictional world is the actual world\; (2) she forms b
 eliefs about the actual world about issues that are morally or epistemical
 ly important. For example\, a satirical deepfake of Queen Elizabeth dancin
 g to a hip-hop song is benign because a reasonable person understands this
  is fiction. But a deepfake of a misogynic speech by Obama is malignant be
 cause it misleads a reasonable person about Obama's views of women. I illu
 strate how this analysis generalizes to other case studies\, such as a Pho
 toshop makeover\, or a QAnon discussion group.
LOCATION:Zoom
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