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TrackerFFtoday at 7:28 AM5 repliesview on HN

I wonder how that works for very similar looking people.

There's one photographer, François Brunelle, who has a project where he takes pictures of doppelgängers: http://www.francoisbrunelle.com/webn/e-project.html


Replies

m4tthumphreytoday at 8:41 AM

This is very odd. Hardly any of them look alike let alone doppelgänger status...

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twiceadaytoday at 8:05 AM

To me #3 sort of looks similar, but everybody else is clearly not close to similar.

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cesarbtoday at 10:30 AM

> I wonder how that works for very similar looking people.

AFAIK, copyright allows for independent creation (unlike patents), so unless one person had deliberately copied the other's appearance, there should be no problem.

dominicrosetoday at 8:23 AM

This reminds me of conspiracy theories about famous people having doubles.

hopelitetoday at 8:48 AM

There are indeed many people that look very similar, and that will only increase if the efforts to eradicate uniqueness and actual separated diversity are successful, but there is also a lesson in the basic concept of, similar is not same. A single wrinkle more or less or a shift in an angle, and it’s not you anymore. The whole concept of likeness is a spurious one at best, akin to how the aristocracy functioned in the past where e.g., the depiction of their profile on a coin was a means of control too.

I was just recently trying to find an associate from my past with an unfortunately common whole full name in his language and was rather surprised at how many of the people depicted online with his name looked extremely similar to him, but upon closer discernment were surely not him. How do you discern that a “deepfake” (what a dumb term) is similar to you and not just similar to anyone else?

Also, what if AI is just trained with images of you? The consequent image will similarly only be an inspiration of you, not you, not the same as even using images in an attempt to graft a very similar facial feature onto an image or map it into a video.

It is in fact also what artists do in physical medium, they look at something/someone and are inspired by it to create an illusion that gives the impression of similarity, but it is not that thing/person. Will this new law possibly make art illegal too because people have not thought this through?

On a digital screen, it is of course also not you at all, it is individual pixels that fool the mind or give an illusion. It is really a pernicious muddling of reality and logic we have allowed to emerge, where the impression of depiction is the property of someone even though it is not that person, but also only if it is the means for control, ie money. Mere peasants have no control over their image taken in public.

The Sphere in Vegas is another good example of this on a large scale, each “pixel” is roughly 6” apart from the other and about 2” in diameter, for all intents and purposes separate objects, each only projecting one array of colors in a matrix of individual LEDs. Up close it looks no different than a colored LED matrix, only when you stand sufficiently far away is your mind tricked into believing you see something that is not really there.

Frankly, these moves to “protect” are very much a direct assault on free expression and even may create unintended consequences if art exceptions do not apply anymore either. Is it now illegal for me to paint a nude, how about from an image that I took of someone? What about if I do it really well from my own memory? What about if I use a modeling tool to recreate such a nude as a digital 3D object from images or even memory? Is AI not also simply a tool? Or is it more?

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