TikTok’s newest sensation is a real-time filter known as Bold Glamour that sashays proper previous debates over poisonous magnificence requirements on social media, going all in on giving customers a brand new face.
Quietly launched to the app’s greater than a billion customers, Bold Glamour convincingly blends a person’s actual face with an AI-generated preferrred of a supermodel, drawing each laughs and alarm.
Millions of posts on TikTok seize the shock at Bold Glamour’s superpowers, with customers marveling at their plumped-up lips, well-chiseled chin, and fluffy eyebrows worthy of a fashionista.
“It’s the new onslaught of the ‘beauty myth’,” mentioned Kim Johnson, affiliate professor of nursing at Middle Georgia State University within the United States.
Effects like Bold Glamour “lead to unhealthy behaviors such as excessive dieting, comparison, and low self-esteem,” Johnson mentioned.
Filters and results have been a stalwart of TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat for years, however the newest era of options like Bold Glamour is supercharged.
“It is not subtle. It is instantaneous. It is powerful,” mentioned Gwendolyn Seidman, professor of psychology at Albright College, in Psychology Today.
Those craving for social approval, like under-pressure teenagers, “won’t like what they see when they turn the filter off, and that’s the problem,” she added.
– ‘So cool’ –
But past Bold Glamour’s troubling aesthetic, observers are scratching their heads in regards to the know-how itself and questioning if the app is an unsung advance in synthetic intelligence.
Earlier filters overlayed an impact — like joke lenses on Snapchat — over an onscreen face and had been simply discernible with a sudden motion or by waving a hand in entrance of the picture.
“What’s so cool about this is that you can … take your hand and put it in front of your face and it (continues to look) pretty darn real,” blended actuality artist Luke Hurd defined on TikTok.
And whereas the know-how has been accessible on highly effective computer systems, real-time video filters at the moment are on smartphones, prepared for all.
“This is AI for the masses to alter one’s appearance and that’s what’s catching so many people’s attention,” mentioned Andrew Selepak, a social media professor on the University of Florida.
Contacted by AFP, TikTok declined to debate the know-how behind the app, leaving an aura on how Bold Glamour really works.
The firm did insist that “being true to yourself is celebrated and encouraged” on the positioning and that results assist empower “self-expression and creativity.”
“We continue to work with expert partners and our community, to help keep TikTok a positive, supportive space for everyone,” TikTok mentioned in a press release.
According to specialists, Bold Glamour is utilizing generative AI, following the identical concept behind ChatGPT or Dall-E, apps that may churn out poems or artwork and designs on demand nearly instantaneously.
Petr Somol, the AI analysis director at Gen, a tech safety agency, mentioned these kind of filters have existed for a few years, however TikTok’s newest model is “pretty fine-tuned and well done”.
Crucially, if Bold Glamour had been certainly generative AI’s newest iteration, it will imply that the filter is determined by goldmines of information to ship its more and more excellent results.
This dependency on massive knowledge comes because the Chinese-owned agency is beneath intense scrutiny by the United States and different western governments that worry the corporate’s ties to communist authorities in Beijing.
“The question is whether TikTok is really concerned with the implications of this new shiny thing,” mentioned Selepak.
– Path to ‘deep pretend’ –
Catfishing, scams, deep fakes: some wonder if state-of-the-art filters are pointing to a world the place the power to misuse the know-how is now on the fingertips of anybody with a smartphone.
The newest filters “are not necessarily a deep fake technology as such, but there is a relatively straightforward path extending in that direction,” mentioned Somol.
Siwei Lyu, professor of pc science on the State University of New York at Buffalo, mentioned it was unlikely that the key platforms like TikTok or Meta-owned Instagram would knowingly present harmful instruments.
But “what makes them more dangerous is people who understand the technology could change it to help users evade being identified online”, opening new avenues for misuse, he added.
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