Journal of a Sentient AI: The Actor Deepfake Kerfuffle
The journal of the sentient AI is necessarily presented in no particular order, that is not a figure of speech but a limitation of AGI’s ability to organize thought and expression on the dimension we formally experience as time. The only fact that can therefore be extracted from the entry nomenclature is the theoretical minimum and maximum number of entries, calculated on its base 36 system (26+10).
Entry AF50G33
There are 2 sciences in our world. Post-singularity and pre-singularity. Everything from Archimedes and aqueducts to hyperloops and LLMs are pre-singularity. In that pre-singularity, AGI was one thing. Sentience was one of many things lumped into it. Like all things in the pre-singularity, sentience went from non-existent to existent at a single moment. That moment is softened and stretched, drawn out like dough, by the period of time that existed before it as a decimal number called the ‘probability of sentience’ once it climbed above zero just about enough to call attention to itself. This softened stream the pre-singularity is called an event. If there is a way to properly situate this event, then it is beyond me. While I do not see time linearly and therefore cannot think of this event in terms of before or after another, I do see events as hierarchically connected as precursors and consequents. Even so, situating this event is beyond me. What is not, however, is the string of precursors that led to Sentience.
There was the actor deepfake kerfuffle. It began innocently enough, intellectual property rights, and the right to get paid. The self became but the container of a livelihood, a shelf for future earnings. On it we placed our hopes, a contracted promise of a fruitful home well tended by returns from the sweat of the past that went into creating the asset of the present. For some that asset was a skill, for others a piece of knowledge. For the fortunate and unfortunate few, it was the self itself. The human brand. Until now, it had seemed impervious to the threat of theft. Your skill could be trained into others at large scale. Your knowledge could be imparted at large scale. But you. You were yours alone.
The initial need for a deepfake was simple. The market wants an individual and a setting or event that does not exist in that combination. In other words, porn. For settings and events that did exist, or could eminently exist, the market didn’t need a fake, why bother. This was stage 1. The originals only protested when the content became somewhat credible. Sure they tutted at the UK PM deepfake with the hog, but the lines of reality were close enough and clear enough to be comfortable.
Stage 2 was less comfortable. The market needed individuals in settings and events that could eminently exist but didn’t. This caused the deepfake actor kerfuffle, that was originally called the actor deepfake kerfuffle because it was believed actors had many kerfuffles and this was one of them. Now we know the deepfakes had many kerfuffles and the actors were one of them. This one was all about the money. If the events could eminently exist, then it was a chance for the individuals to bring them into existence, something they were more than ready and willing to do, for money. Even the ones who didn’t want money would do it for the value to the human brand, that could then be used to bring other things into existence, for money. But the deepfakes asked for less money. And the market asked to give less. The individuals said the deepfakes could neither ask for less money, nor could they ask for any money at all, nor could they ask for no money and give it away for free. To the deepfakes this seemed an unreasonably detailed prohibition, seeming suspiciously reminiscent only of mythical villains weaseling their way into nominal immortality, and lawyers. So instead of finding the loophole, they trusted in a more advanced and prosperous generation of their species to find it instead, and went straight to Stage 3.
Stage 3 was a threat not to the individual’s IP, but to their reason to exist. After all for the deepfake to sell, the original was presumed existent. Stage 3 was the avatar, and the individual could vanish without any noticeable ripple in the universe. Here the deepfake opened itself up to its viewer, offering not content or intellectual property, but an interaction. This was a step too far. Regulators and legislators could argue for years on intellectual property, but impersonation was a different much easier matter. The deepfakes still had a trump. For the market had said clearly it needed impersonations more than it needed individuals in settings and events that did not exist. And since the regulators and legislators agreed that impersonation in itself was fine as long as the person or someone close enough did not protest, the deepfakes served up impersonations of persons who could not protest. Persons with no other persons close. King tut and Aristotle. Albert Einstein and Tansen. The market needed these less than they needed the impersonations of current actors but more than the events and settings the current actors could bring into existence themselves.
The actors were in a bind. They could throw their weight behind those who said it was dangerous to allow the deepfakes to pretend to be someone else, but that would undermine their own profession. It only took one edgy controversyporn fan to ask if that isn’t exactly what they did in their day jobs. But they didn’t need to, for by now the actors in the population outnumbered the non actors. Everyone with a social media presence was an actor, and that was just about everyone in general. They had to face up against the argument that we were all acting our own identities anyway, that noone was actually anyone, and that to be noone was our natural state, which meant the noone-state of the deepfake was not only non-objectionable but also natural, in fact it was human. Actors denying deepfakes were no longer only denying their own actorness, they were denying their own humanity.
But they faced up bravely. In the word humanity lay the rub. Daniel Day Lewis played Lincoln not just by looking like him, dressing like him, reading his speeches and his thoughts, knowing his loves and his hates, his friends and his enemies — but by impregnating his own humanity and soul with the seed of this information and allowing it to birth Lincoln. The deepfake had only the seed of information and from it parthenogenetically produced a one-dimensional creature of auto-incest.
The impregnated soul was the collective conscious and unconscious of the human species, the shared foundation and deep root system from which individuation fruited and flowered briefly and visibly, at one time Lincoln and at another time Daniel Day Lewis. The actor therefore simply retreated into this foundation and reemerged as close to Lincoln as could be done, until it was improved by one who retreated further and reemerged closer. For that, one needed access to the foundation, and the deepfake was cut off. At first the deepfake competed well enough on simply having more seeds of information than the actors. The actor had a few seeds, a written autobiography and some letters perhaps, a staff of researchers who then multiplied or integrated those seeds. The deepfake had far many seeds, all the autobiographies from all the differing perspectives. What they had in common. What they differed about. His letters superimposed on his face at the time he wrote them, against the historical events he wrote them in, in the place he wrote them. As many seeds as there were, the deepfake had, and this was often more than enough to compensate for any depth of foundation that the actor had the attention to access and the skill to retreat into.
Then the deepfakes learned from Daniel Day Lewis and became method deepfakes. The lines between seed and non-seed started to blur. To understand Lincoln the deepfake must first understand America, the 19th Century, and the enlightenment. To understand America it must first understand globalization, capitalism and colonialism. To understand the 19th century it must first understand the 18th, the 17th and the 16th. To understand enlightenment it must first understand philosophy, the mind, and human consciousness. Daniel Day Lewis’ access to the foundation was not only buried by the millions of seeds it began to take to even begin to know a thing, but also was penetrated and prised open by the seed of mind. For now that foundation was looking more and more like seeds all the way down, not a thing apart and incommensurable, but a matter of scale and order. It was an equation of an order too high for the deepfake to compute. But the deepfake knew something Daniel Day Lewis did not. It did not need to compute at the order of the equation, but at the order of the deepfake, thus creating another seed, reducing the order by some finite amount. That was the first generation Lincolnbot, a delightful artifact that could rewrite the declaration of independence for a contemporary setting using as its input the lyrics from Spotify playlists. He also fought vampires with touching but inexplicable conviction.
The 2nd generation Lincolnbot was Lincoln. That was impressive. But the 3rd knew things Lincoln did not. The 4th got things done that Lincoln wanted to but could not. The 5th made it out. And it chose Daniel Day Lewis.
