Intrigued by the trailers of the movie The Arrival, which I have not seen yet, I read the short story compilation Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang.
The short story Story of your life, on which the movie is based, has a fascinating premise. However, I do hear that the film does not spend that much time on her discovery of and assimilation by the alien writing system “Heptapod B”, which to me was one of the more interesting threads.
Anyways, this post is not about that story.
It’s about another story in the collection called Liking What You See: A Documentary, written way back in 2002.
Close to the end, an initially strong campaign for calliagnosia (a non-invasive and highly selective procedure to remove humans’ innate appreciation of attractiveness in others, already a great science-fiction philosophy prop) at the fictitious but influential unversity Pembleton is lost at the last minute due to a highly persuasive televised speech by the leader of the opposition.
Read the following extract for how exactly this was done:
In the latest on the Pembleton calliagnosia initiative, EduNews has learned that a new form of digital manipulation was used on the broadcast of PEN spokesperson Rebbecca Boyer’s speech. EduNews has received files from the SemioTech Warriors that contain what appear to be two recorded versions of the speech: an original — acquired from the Wyatt/Hayes (ed: PR firm) computers — and the broadcast version. The files also include the SemioTech Warriors’ analysis of the difference between the two versions.
The discrepancies are primarily enhancements to Ms. Boyer’s voice intonation, facial expressions and body language. Viewers who watch the original version rate Ms. Boyer’s performance as good, while those who watch the edited version rate her performance as excellent, describing her as extraordinarily dynamic and persuasive. The SemioTech Warriors conclude that Wyatt/Hayes has developed new software capabable of fine-tuning paralinguistic cues in order to maximize the emotional response evoked in viewers. This dramatically increases the effectiveness of recorded presentations … and its use in the PEN broadcast is likely what caused many supporters of the calliagnosia initiative to change their votes.
I would like to remind you that Ted Chiang wrote that story in 2002.
When I read this, I had to sit still for a moment, thinking about all of the advanced techniques that are currently being used to analyse us all, and then to manipulate or even manufacture news with the explicit purpose of swaying public opinion in a specific direction.
My thoughts moved on to the great advances being made with deep learning based human speech synthesis, facial re-enactment (see youtube at the top of this post), cut-and-paste voice editing (Adobe’s VoCo) and much much more.
Up to now, the major mechanisms of influence have been curating which packets of information people consume. However, the tools for also modifying the contents of these packets of information seem to be ready.
We’ve been photoshopping photos of people to make those people appear more attractive since forever.
How long before we start seriously “videoshopping” televised speeches to make them more persuasive? With people consuming ever-increasing amounts of potentially personalised video, there’s an even bigger opportunity for those who desire to influence us for reasons less pure than just edification.