Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • The camera lies

    If you think we’ve got problems with fake news now, wait until deepfake is mainstream.

    The Guardian:

    Show a neural network enough examples of faces from two celebrities and it’ll develop its own mental model of what they look like, capable of generating new faces with specific expressions.

    Ask it to generate a set of expressions on one face that are mapped onto a second face, and you have the beginnings of a convincing, automatically generated, utterly fake video. And so, naturally, the internet created a lot of porn.

    I haven’t seen the porn – I have no interest in seeing videos created without people’s consent – but I have seen what the technology can do in the hands of ethical people.

    This is absolutely stunning: Sven Charleer replaces actors with his wife.

    Beyond just pure fun, I can only imagine how people will start turning this tech into business ideas. Fashion will be huge (what would I look like with this kind of hair, this kind of dress…), fitness could be interesting (do I look good with muscles, will I really look better skinny), travel (this is you standing on a beach is going to be quite convincing). It’ll bring advertising to a whole new level. No need to imagine what if, they’ll tell you what your “better” life will look like! And it’ll be hard to get that picture out of your head…

    This technology is in its infancy, but it’s getting smarter by the day. And the potential ramifications for everything from revenge porn to political propaganda are enormous and disturbing.

    Back to The Guardian:

    It’s grim. But it’s not going to go away. The technology is publicly available, extensively documented, and the subject of research around the globe. This is our world now. As Lucas warned MPs: “Please don’t spend too much time looking in the mirror at what Russia did to us; look through the windscreen at what’s coming down the road. That’s much more dangerous.”

  • “The world is very different when you walk in women’s shoes”

    Metro asked me to write about International Women’s Day from the perspective of a trans person.

    There’s no method to this madness, no reason for it. Men aren’t from Mars, women aren’t from Venus, and nobody’s made of slugs, snails or puppy dogs’ tails, let alone sugar and spice and all things nice. The only reason we value supposedly masculine traits and roles over supposedly feminine ones, the only reason women are treated so badly, is because – surprise! – the people who’ve traditionally decided what’s important are a bunch of guys.

  • “My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come?”

    Good news for anybody stuck in 1818: The Sun and The Times have both shared the incredible revelation that according to “snowflake students”, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus should be pitied.

    Here’s The Sun:

    Next the snowflakes will be telling us that The Metamorphosis wasn’t really about cockroaches and that Jonathan Swift didn’t really want us to eat children.

    As the kids might put it: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

     

  • The problem with concert tickets

    Secondary ticketing – the sites ripping off consumers by charging enormous fees on top of industrial scale ticket touting – is in the news again today. We need more transparency about their charges, apparently.

    That’s true: the sites use every trick in the book to hide their fees, which are ridiculous. There’s a huge service charge, which can be as much as 30%, and the sites take a cut of the seller’s money too, typically 10% to 15%. Consumers are gouged at every opportunity. For example, GetMeIn – owned by Ticketmaster and promoted heavily on its site, and on the screens in venues such as the SSE Hydro in Glasgow – charges £10.57 to post your tickets in the UK. You’d think its buyer and seller fees might include the cost of an envelope and a stamp.

    Transparency isn’t the big problem here. It’s the entire industry. These sites, and the sections of the industry that feed them, are making music unaffordable for ordinary people.

    What we really need is more transparency about the sheer corruption of the concert ticketing industry. Ticket touting is happening on an industrial scale, and the idea that reselling is just ordinary people who discover they can’t go is absolute bullshit.

    This is an industry worth £1 billion per year in the UK.

    Here’s Viagogo, one of the reselling sites, with one of the 28 pages of tickets for the Rolling Stones in Edinburgh. Many of the sellers apparently bought four or six tickets before suddenly remembering that they couldn’t go.

    Here’s Iron Maiden’s manager, Rod Smallwood, who found nearly 7,000 tickets for his band’s tour on the resale sites within 48 hours of going on sale.

    “The implication is that 6,294 people decided within two days of buying a ticket for a concert taking place in 9 months’ time, all of a sudden they can’t go. I mean it’s sheer nonsense, it was just profiteering to the worst degree. The secondary platforms give the real heavy duty touts the ability to sell tickets on an industrial scale.”

    This is anti-consumer behaviour. It’s making art something only the well-off can experience, because whenever you have something for which demand will always outweigh supply you’ll attract sharks.

    And the government knows this. This kind of profiteering with football tickets is illegal under section 166 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, further amended by section 53 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006. It was also illegal to re-sell tickets for the 2012 Olympics.

    It should be illegal for music too.

    If you’d like to know more, the FanFair Alliance has some excellent information for you.

  • Think of the children

    This video, by Sarah McBride, is very good. It asks a very simple question: if your loved one came out as trans, what kind of world would you want them to live in?

  • DMGM: Never Lonely Again

    This one’s about being enormously sociable on the internet and completely alone in real life. David came up with the main riff while messing around with the SoundPrism app, and despite my best efforts to turn it into a punk-metal song it ended up much more floaty. You can imagine Snoop Dogg rapping over it. Well, I can.

  • DMGM: The Sun Is Gonna Shine

    This one’s three years old, and it’s about optimism: after a year of treatment my depression seemed to be on the way out, and I wanted to try and capture that in music. I love David’s guitar in this: it’s woozy and languid, which fits the subject perfectly.

    Most of the time when I write words I imagine somebody else writing them, so while I’m in there not everything is autobiographical: it’s imagining somebody whose illness was much worse than mine, leaving burnt bridges and ruined relationships in its wake. So while it’s about optimism and starting again it’s also about the crushing loneliness of someone who’s hit rock bottom: “the sun is gonna shine today” is as much of a prayer as it is a statement.

  • Let’s talk about sex, baby

    I posted the other day about supposed trans-species people, but I think my point got a bit lost.

    • Transgender people are real.
    • Werewolves, elves and dragons aren’t.

    There’s no such thing as a dragon spectrum, where some people are a little bit dragon and others quite a lot.

    There’s no chromosome that makes you an elf.

    No hormone that’ll make you a werewolf.

    Whereas transgender people are part of the infinite variety of human brains and bodies.

    Think of it like making soup: a slight change in the recipe, in the quality of the ingredients, in the way you cook, in the amount of seasoning you add or the time you cook can have a big effect on the end result.

    What’s true for minestrone is equally true for human beings. Our biological soup has room for all kinds of variations.

  • Fighting words

    Conservative MP Nadine Dorries on Twitter:

    This is incredibly dangerous, and she’s not the only MP using such language. And of course certain newspapers run headlines about “enemies of the people”.

    These aren’t words that anybody should use when violent nationalism is resurgent.

    This is the kind of language that gets people killed.

  • How journalism should work

    Imagine if journalists writing articles about things spoke to people with expert knowledge of those things.

    That’s what Caitlin Logan does.

    To find out what concerns Scottish women’s groups may have about gender reform, trans people and self-ID, she spoke to women’s groups: Engender, Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, the Young Women’s Movement (YWCA Scotland), Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, Forth Valley Rape Crisis, Edinburgh Women’s Aid, and Shakti Women’s Aid.

    This is what a trans debate should look like: sober, sensible, well-informed. The reason we don’t get that debate is because all too often, the only opinions sought by journalists are from bigots and cranks.

    The Scottish Government’s consultation on gender reform ends this Thursday, and has been the subject of a co-ordinated campaign by said bigots and cranks. If you have a more reasoned opinion, it’d be great if you could add your voice. 

    Here’s what the Equality Network has to say in its open letter to LGB people, our friends and our families.

    This is a debate about how some of the most marginalised people in our community are treated. It’s about making things just that little bit easier for trans people. It’s about dignity but most of all its about making Scotland a more equal place.

    As Logan’s article makes it clear, a great deal of what you’ve read about the proposed reforms simply isn’t true.