14 ms·

TikTok “teen” AI filter is hitting hard for Gen-X users

164 points by mortenjorck 4y ago

tamaharbor 4y ago
Father Time always wins.
- brobinson 4y ago
  The apex predator.
cute_boi 4y ago
Actually, this is better than using expensive makeup just to make videos :).
uptownfunk 4y ago
Wow, the emotional reactions are really something to take in. You don't really notice your youth going, it happens so slowly. It's almost like seeing a long lost friend. I can totally empathize with the reactions here. AI is really something else.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  OTOH I'm really happy I've finally got some grey hairs and can pull off a little bit of gravitas.
- melagonster 4y ago
  this is how I understand why older people always try to offer advice. we just don't find we are old :(
- A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
  But is it really "AI"? Seems like little more than a fancy image processing method that: - recognizes a face - removes a few common wrinkles, e.g. nasolabial folds (-- these in particular are the most common marker of an "aged" face, and people who don't have them or who have broad nasiolabial folds are often said to "age gracefully") - smooths out and brightens the rest. It's not creating or generating anything, really. Just running a very adroit filter in real time. To what extent is it, then, AI? We should be wary of the way buzzwords are inserted everywhere, I think. (Remember when it was all "nano"?)
  - dymk 4y ago
    It's called AI because there's an ML model in there somewhere doing some heavy lifting
    - tantalor 4y ago
      > some heavy lifting Nice
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      That's called just ML... ML doesn't imply intelligence.
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    It's not AI, it's advanced image processing.
    - cirrus3 4y ago
      - Hey check out this AI tiktok feature - You mean advanced image processing? - blank stare. uh... ok, whatever, it's really cool - It is advanced image processing, not "AI" - yea, so anyway, check this out
    - adastra22 4y ago
      The whole history of AI is one of moving goal posts: X is hard, only people can do it. X requires intelligence. A computer doing X is AI. AI researcher programs a computer to do X Oh, X isn't AI, it's just [describe what AI researcher did]. That's not real AI.
      - salamo 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect > Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
- jimlongton 4y ago
  > You don't really notice your youth going, it happens so slowly. Unless you're unlucky and start losing your hair in your 20s. That really teaches you a lot of life lessons about self-image, aging, the way beauty is marketed and about confidence in general. I think accepting hair loss and aging made me a better person. These AI youth filters actually annoy me because they are so blatantly manipulative and prey on insecurities often instilled/reinforced by advertising and social media in the first place.
  - Graziano_M 4y ago
    Hey try having your hair dresser tell you at EIGHTEEN you're going bald :)
- Karellen 4y ago
  You don't have any old photos of yourself from when you were younger?
  - uptownfunk 4y ago
    There's something different about looking at yourself in the mirror and looking at old photos.
- jhanschoo 4y ago
  > Wow, the emotional reactions are really something to take in. I suppose you aren't a frequent user of Tiktok, which is a good thing. I think I'll also be addressing the general HN reader with this comment. Exaggerated and performed responses are a staple of content on the Tiktok platform, which isn't to say that the filter itself isn't something you can use to reflect on. But give it a browse, and browse enough and you'll see that the content there is mostly acted out and inauthentic, and you'll get a better sense of just how manufactured it is. Savvy teens, children and young adults who frequent the platform know how inauthentic it is. Which is not to say that it isn't entertaining; like how wrestling and drama serials are fictional yet entertaining.
  - teucris 4y ago
    Some of these people were really good actors then? There were definitely some videos with exaggerated responses but there were several that I have a hard time believing weren’t authentic.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      It's easy to be a really good actor for 30 seconds on a cellphone camera
- sixQuarks 4y ago
  I think the vast majority of them are acting. I tried the filter, sure it makes you look younger but it doesn’t make you look like you were when you were a teenager. It has some unique distortions that just don’t look like your younger self
- kcartlidge 4y ago
  > AI is really something else. Yes, it is. AI is really something else. Not this, which isn't AI at all.
ecshafer 4y ago
This is waxing poetically about a filter, which seems melodramatic. Its a good lesson to not believe what you see or hear on the interwebs though.
- duxup 4y ago
  >not believe what you see or hear on the interwebs though. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
bigmattystyles 4y ago
Now do the opposite and make some teens cry, or at least, moisturize and use sunscreen daily.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  Nah, teens haven't known that person yet. This is emotional because of nostalgia. ...And not knowing that it was gone. I am not trying this one.
  - chrispine 4y ago
    My forties were _so far away_ in my teens, like impossibly far away. But on this side of it, it really doesn't seem like all that long ago. Time isn't the same over here.
    - gonehome 4y ago
      Supposedly that effect continues, the first third of life feels longer than the last two subjectively (at least I've heard that claimed). Wouldn't surprise me if it's a mixture of processing speed slowing down making things feel like they're moving faster and just the fact that each year is a small percentage of your life. Maybe also less variety day to day as an adult, fewer big changes. You can test the clock speed thing and there's some evidence for it (ask different aged people to estimate when a minute has passed, stuff like that).
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        I dunno if that test would really get to it. Presumably people have an updating idea of what a minute feel like, unless they stopped interacting with clocks in their teenage years.
      - exodust 4y ago
        The watched kettle never boils. Kids are impatiently waiting to grow up, to get through their teens so they can drive cars, earn money, live freely. The average school day is a long day at the office. I recall sitting in class day-dreaming about not sitting in class.
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
This is one filter I know I'm never ever going to try. JFC those reactions already have me emotional
genericone 4y ago
sad pikachu: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AMWts8Br1c4klqyB-7egBYqoIUMFR0816cfRXg14fjuhPVDbUH7pTCmH04QoKLhRf-zxahVNuvOT_4vSScnuUuLHErFqjrntFBe4fmMHnJB18zDlp0K6Jj0rRHSMmmPyx1m5vM0oHrfsVHN0IfFZ-8hPH7s=w145-h334-s-no?authuser=0 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AMWts8Br1c4klqyB-7egBYq...
jimlongton 4y ago
Related "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence." [1] Does anyone else find these videos extremely emotionally manipulative and creepy? Now users have to contend with not just everyone else being unrealistically beautiful and young due to makeup and lighting but also AI. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
- dymk 4y ago
  Alternatively, now everybody has the technology to make themselves look younger in their pictures if they feel the desire to. No need to be a photoshop / aftereffects expert.
- redeeman 4y ago
  "now people have to contend with fake things existing" maybe its time people get a grip and realize photoshopped stuff is not real, movies are not real, cartoons are not real. Get a grip and do not attempt to run into the huge boulder just because a cartoon showed the roadrunner being able to.
  - jimlongton 4y ago
    I suggested reading the linked article. > “Results showed that exposure to manipulated Instagram photos directly led to lower body image.” Engeln, Loach, Imundo, & Zola (2020) Children with vulnerable developing brains being targeted by algorithms designed by teams of engineers and PhDs to exploit human psychology don't stand a chance. You may as well be telling heroin addicts to "just don't get addicted bro". You can show kids /r/Instagramreality/ [1]. I doubt it will help. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/
    - redeeman 4y ago
      > You may as well be telling heroin addicts to "just don't get addicted bro". that makes no sense, it would be more like telling people that are not yet addicted: "dont get addicted bro". and yes, dont fucking get addicted edit: humans are also attracted to fire, we tell kids, "dont stick your fingers into the fire", they learn.
pasquinelli 4y ago
i'll never know how much of those reactions are genuine and how much of them are content.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  How much of (unrecorded) human behavior is performance vs an expression of the individual self? Can genuine ever be determined deterministically?
ryandrake 4y ago
I like how it tries to fill in male hairlines and gives bald men a generic crewcut. It's the only thing "additive" I saw, the rest just looked like smoothing and brightening filters.
rvz 4y ago
Once again, do not believe anything you see, hear or read on the internet.
darth_avocado 4y ago
Am I the only one that finds this frightening? Adults pretending to be teens is going to open up a whole new can of worms the implications are crazy. Keep in mind this is an app with millions of teens hooked on to it. What’s more terrifying is what happens to explicit material where consenting adults use filters like this? Is the law keeping up with tech like this?
- dheera 4y ago
  There's not much the law needs to do. People just need to learn that when they open up apps like that they're going into a world full of fake shit. Nothing is real.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- uonpopular_th 4y ago
  >What’s more terrifying is what happens to explicit material where consenting adults use filters like this? Is the law keeping up with tech like this? I hope not. I'm sick and tired of everything being illegal because someone finds it yucky.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  > Adults pretending to be teens Creepy guys have been pretending to be young for internet aeons by simply reposting other young people's content. > what happens to explicit material where consenting adults use filters like this Artwork of CP is still CP in the US, per 18 U.S.C. § 1466A. Whether a face-swapping application constitutes that...?
  - darth_avocado 4y ago
    > Artwork of CP is still CP Thank god
  - jxramos 4y ago
    indeed a long time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AlDTjiWdKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AlDTjiWdKg
jimmygrapes 4y ago
It does not add pimples and gangliness though
blindriver 4y ago
As a GenX who played with that filter yesterday, I don't understand why anyone's reaction would be to cry. I for one and so very VERY happy I'm not growing up as a young person today. Life today is extremely hard for millenials and Gen Z. I would not trade any amount of time to be young again. I was lucky enough to get into the right career, I am very happy with the set of beliefs and morals I have, which I'm teaching my kids, and I have a house in the Bay Area. If my kids didn't have my wife and I to inherit from, I have no idea how they would ever be able to afford a house. I met my wife during a time when you met face-to-face through friends, and we dated without each other having to be distracted by 24x7 work, phone, or online dating apps. I look at my life and I'm satisfied. I know a lot of my friends are satisfied as well. A lot of millenials and Gen Z that I work with and are friends with had a different world they had to go through, are saddles with 6 figure student debt, no chance of a house, and are lonely. It's not fair and I wish this weren't the case, and I really hope that things like social media go out of fashion by the time my kids are teenagers.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  >> If my kids didn't have my wife and I to inherit from Isn't it a nice feeling when you children impatiently wait for you to kick the bucket)
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >are saddles with 6 figure student debt ... and are lonely. While I sympathize with the plights of younger generations, student debt and (mis)use of communication tools are not one of them. Unlike wider problems such as cost of living/housing and geopolitics, student debt and communications are two things completely within your domain of control. You choose to take on debt in the six digits, you choose to use communication tools the way you do. If you don't want crippling debt, don't take out that loan; college isn't the end-all-be-all in life. If the likes of Facebook/Twitter and Discord are making you miserable, just don't use them or change how you use them; life doesn't revolve around social media. Hell, even buying a house is still within the realm of sensiblity if you look beyond the metropolitan areas. There's more to life than permanently connected city life stemming from a college degree.
rexreed 4y ago
Get. Off. Tiktok. Get. Off. Social media. I feel like an old man screaming at kids to get off the lawn. But am I the only one? What's the draw on Tiktok really? I never got it. Then again I never got Twitter either. In my day, we had Usenet for social media and BBSes. And when we cried, it's because we were flamed hard. I have much respect for AI researchers who are some of the most talented in the world, and yet it's cognitive dissonance for me to see them working for social media and advertising companies.
- beej71 4y ago
  But if you used the filter you could be a young man.
  - rexreed 4y ago
    I'd use the double old man filter and look like a raisin screaming at the younguns.
- cmckn 4y ago
  This isn’t really a TikTok invention, filters like this were popularized on Snapchat years ago. TikTok is primarily a YouTube alternative, and there’s perfectly good content to be found (sometimes in spite of the algorithm). Agree in general, though. Social media is a business for some and for everyone else it’s just mind-games.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- aaron695 4y ago
  > I feel like an old man screaming at kids to get off the lawn You are an old man screaming at kids and normal people playing in a park. TikTok is the most non-toxic social media. It's a positive sign we can move forward past Facebook and Twitter. And it's more positive than HN. You don't have old people on TikTok to trying destroy what young people are doing to reclaim their youth.
tablespoon 4y ago
It's kind of interesting how it managed to leave an actual teen's face untouched: https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628765242242072576 https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628765242242072576.
- Nowado 4y ago
  That is easily the most impressive one to me. Like edge detector applied to a single pixel line or locally exact gaussian distribution under gaussian blur, but abstracted way higher.
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    I don't understand why that's so impressive. If the AI is designed to remove wrinkles, and a face has no wrinkles, it wouldn't remove anything.
ModernMech 4y ago
I think this one was pretty insightful: https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628768218381791232 https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628768218381791232 The person says that seeing herself as a teenager basically instantly cured her anxieties from being bullied for being "ugly" as a child. It's not unlike psychedelic users reporting drastic changes in their outlook after a trip. Would be interesting to study this.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
I'm mildly surprised anyone from Generation X would even consider using TikTok.
paxys 4y ago
We need to stop treating random Tweets as news or objective fact. This one person may have been "hit hard" by this filter. Others have not.
- DanHulton 4y ago
  Should probably RTFA, friend. There's a whole twitter thread full of people taking full-on psychic damage from this filter. It's definitely hitting a significant percentage of people pretty hard.
  - paxys 4y ago
    "You shouldn't use a Twitter post as news" "Ah don't worry, there's an entire thread"
Overtonwindow 4y ago
What I love about TikTok filters is how good they are at getting people to show their face. If TikTok is collecting biometrics, they are sure doing a great job at it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fbrncci 4y ago
Kind of frightening! I tried it out, and it doesn't look like me, but there is a resemblance to a younger me. Having my "current" me in the other video panel makes it even more shocking. I really understand why people are taken away by this. Imagine this a few years out, where you could feed such a filter pictures of actual younger you. A filter like this could become close to perfect. Now imagine a MMO which takes in all of that ... don't tell Zuck about this idea.
- cirrus3 4y ago
  yea, training it on some actual photos would really take this up a notch, a huge notch. The reactions would be 1000% more heavy, and they are already pretty heavy
  - fbrncci 4y ago
    You could train it on different age ranges too and then use a sliding scale to lock yourself into a particular age. For an MMO this would be pretty cool, reminds me of something black mirror could come up with.
    - chime 4y ago
      Apple, Google, Facebook+Instagram, and Amazon already have every photo of most people since 2010. They can do that today if they decide. For my kids, they have every photo and video since the day they were born. For the newer portrait photos and cinematic videos, they even have depth data.
lakomen 4y ago
Wow this is really amazing. I'll have to try that and also show my 88 year old mom this.
lakomen 4y ago
Where is the filter? I just tried creating a video but what filter is it? Is that a just a hoax?
userbinator 4y ago
All this AI-enhanced imagery has a certain creepy, unsettling unnaturalness to it that I can easily recognise at a glance, but it seems a lot of people unfortunately can't.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
31337Logic 4y ago
It's not right to call this an AI filter. It's amazing how lazy we've been getting with our terminology lately. Every impressive algorithm has the AI label slapped on it.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Why don't you go reproduce it and then come back and tell us what type of technique you used. (It will be a machine learning technique, otherwise commonly referred to as AI).
noonething 4y ago
The Mirror of Erised for many people
rvieira 4y ago
It's interesting that there seems to be a core generation target for these kind of things. I remember many years ago, the craze of the "see how you'll look as an old person" filters. Now it's the "see how you'd look as a young person" filter.
jzellis 4y ago
Maybe this hits harder if you're sick or in actual danger of dying young (ish), but... man. I'm not going within a million miles of this filter. I would not want to be young now and participate in the bullshit they feel pressured to participate in, but if you put me back in my body at twenty again, without the blown-out heart and the ruined spine and the trashed rotator cuffs and the bad knees - well, I already had those, thanks to the bumper of a Geo Metro, but still - I think I could find a way to not give a fuck about social media or social expectations or any of that shit. I'd treat that body like somebody just handed me the keys to a Lambo - no more smoking and drinking and doing hard drugs and eating shitty food sitting in front of a computer for decades. I'd go wander the earth like dude in Kung Fu, eating like a hippie and not wasting my time on aspirational capitalist bullshit. Nobody I know wants to be a young person now. But most of us would love to be a middle-aged person in a young person's body.
hokkos 4y ago
I wonder why this filter doesn't work on my Pixel 7 Pro. I don't find any occurrence of this problem on the web.
RicoElectrico 4y ago
The filter is quite simple - brightening and smoothing the skin; apart from that - getting rid of that goddamn "tent" between nose and lips i.e. nasolabial folds. And the wrinkle between your eyebrows. As I'm 30 and people tell me I look younger than I really am, guess this is my sign to take skincare more seriously while I can. I am already halfway there by not smoking and rarely drinking alcohol.
speby 4y ago
I messed around with it. First, it didn't look one bit like myself as a younger me. It was like an artificially blemish-free version and it even tries, haphazardly, to fill in a receding hair line. To be honest, it was funny. I'm sure people's reaction to get teary-eyed have less to do with the literal-ness of the filter and more of a surfacing catharsis deep-down that people have about the passage of time, lost opportunities, distant pain or hurt, disappointment, and also perhaps a nostalgia for once was growing up. It's a pretty human thing.
walt74 4y ago
I just wrote a piece on this thread: https://goodinternet.substack.com/p/teenage-kicks https://goodinternet.substack.com/p/teenage-kicks In an age of wishful mnemonics, be careful what you fish for.

164 points by mortenjorck 4y ago

tamaharbor 4y ago

Father Time always wins.

brobinson 4y ago
The apex predator.

cute_boi 4y ago

Actually, this is better than using expensive makeup just to make videos :).

uptownfunk 4y ago

Wow, the emotional reactions are really something to take in. You don't really notice your youth going, it happens so slowly. It's almost like seeing a long lost friend. I can totally empathize with the reactions here. AI is really something else.

lamontcg 4y ago
OTOH I'm really happy I've finally got some grey hairs and can pull off a little bit of gravitas.
melagonster 4y ago
this is how I understand why older people always try to offer advice. we just don't find we are old :(
A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
But is it really "AI"? Seems like little more than a fancy image processing method that: - recognizes a face - removes a few common wrinkles, e.g. nasolabial folds (-- these in particular are the most common marker of an "aged" face, and people who don't have them or who have broad nasiolabial folds are often said to "age gracefully") - smooths out and brightens the rest. It's not creating or generating anything, really. Just running a very adroit filter in real time. To what extent is it, then, AI? We should be wary of the way buzzwords are inserted everywhere, I think. (Remember when it was all "nano"?)
- dymk 4y ago
  It's called AI because there's an ML model in there somewhere doing some heavy lifting
  - tantalor 4y ago
    > some heavy lifting Nice
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    That's called just ML... ML doesn't imply intelligence.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  It's not AI, it's advanced image processing.
  - cirrus3 4y ago
    - Hey check out this AI tiktok feature - You mean advanced image processing? - blank stare. uh... ok, whatever, it's really cool - It is advanced image processing, not "AI" - yea, so anyway, check this out
  - adastra22 4y ago
    The whole history of AI is one of moving goal posts: X is hard, only people can do it. X requires intelligence. A computer doing X is AI. AI researcher programs a computer to do X Oh, X isn't AI, it's just [describe what AI researcher did]. That's not real AI.
    - salamo 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect > Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
jimlongton 4y ago
> You don't really notice your youth going, it happens so slowly. Unless you're unlucky and start losing your hair in your 20s. That really teaches you a lot of life lessons about self-image, aging, the way beauty is marketed and about confidence in general. I think accepting hair loss and aging made me a better person. These AI youth filters actually annoy me because they are so blatantly manipulative and prey on insecurities often instilled/reinforced by advertising and social media in the first place.
- Graziano_M 4y ago
  Hey try having your hair dresser tell you at EIGHTEEN you're going bald :)
Karellen 4y ago
You don't have any old photos of yourself from when you were younger?
- uptownfunk 4y ago
  There's something different about looking at yourself in the mirror and looking at old photos.
jhanschoo 4y ago
> Wow, the emotional reactions are really something to take in. I suppose you aren't a frequent user of Tiktok, which is a good thing. I think I'll also be addressing the general HN reader with this comment. Exaggerated and performed responses are a staple of content on the Tiktok platform, which isn't to say that the filter itself isn't something you can use to reflect on. But give it a browse, and browse enough and you'll see that the content there is mostly acted out and inauthentic, and you'll get a better sense of just how manufactured it is. Savvy teens, children and young adults who frequent the platform know how inauthentic it is. Which is not to say that it isn't entertaining; like how wrestling and drama serials are fictional yet entertaining.
- teucris 4y ago
  Some of these people were really good actors then? There were definitely some videos with exaggerated responses but there were several that I have a hard time believing weren’t authentic.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    It's easy to be a really good actor for 30 seconds on a cellphone camera
sixQuarks 4y ago
I think the vast majority of them are acting. I tried the filter, sure it makes you look younger but it doesn’t make you look like you were when you were a teenager. It has some unique distortions that just don’t look like your younger self
kcartlidge 4y ago
> AI is really something else. Yes, it is. AI is really something else. Not this, which isn't AI at all.

ecshafer 4y ago

This is waxing poetically about a filter, which seems melodramatic. Its a good lesson to not believe what you see or hear on the interwebs though.

duxup 4y ago
>not believe what you see or hear on the interwebs though. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

bigmattystyles 4y ago

Now do the opposite and make some teens cry, or at least, moisturize and use sunscreen daily.

lelandfe 4y ago
Nah, teens haven't known that person yet. This is emotional because of nostalgia. ...And not knowing that it was gone. I am not trying this one.
- chrispine 4y ago
  My forties were _so far away_ in my teens, like impossibly far away. But on this side of it, it really doesn't seem like all that long ago. Time isn't the same over here.
  - gonehome 4y ago
    Supposedly that effect continues, the first third of life feels longer than the last two subjectively (at least I've heard that claimed). Wouldn't surprise me if it's a mixture of processing speed slowing down making things feel like they're moving faster and just the fact that each year is a small percentage of your life. Maybe also less variety day to day as an adult, fewer big changes. You can test the clock speed thing and there's some evidence for it (ask different aged people to estimate when a minute has passed, stuff like that).
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      I dunno if that test would really get to it. Presumably people have an updating idea of what a minute feel like, unless they stopped interacting with clocks in their teenage years.
    - exodust 4y ago
      The watched kettle never boils. Kids are impatiently waiting to grow up, to get through their teens so they can drive cars, earn money, live freely. The average school day is a long day at the office. I recall sitting in class day-dreaming about not sitting in class.

lovehashbrowns 4y ago

This is one filter I know I'm never ever going to try. JFC those reactions already have me emotional

genericone 4y ago

sad pikachu: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AMWts8Br1c4klqyB-7egBYqoIUMFR0816cfRXg14fjuhPVDbUH7pTCmH04QoKLhRf-zxahVNuvOT_4vSScnuUuLHErFqjrntFBe4fmMHnJB18zDlp0K6Jj0rRHSMmmPyx1m5vM0oHrfsVHN0IfFZ-8hPH7s=w145-h334-s-no?authuser=0 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AMWts8Br1c4klqyB-7egBYq...

jimlongton 4y ago

Related "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence." [1] Does anyone else find these videos extremely emotionally manipulative and creepy? Now users have to contend with not just everyone else being unrealistically beautiful and young due to makeup and lighting but also AI. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

dymk 4y ago
Alternatively, now everybody has the technology to make themselves look younger in their pictures if they feel the desire to. No need to be a photoshop / aftereffects expert.
redeeman 4y ago
"now people have to contend with fake things existing" maybe its time people get a grip and realize photoshopped stuff is not real, movies are not real, cartoons are not real. Get a grip and do not attempt to run into the huge boulder just because a cartoon showed the roadrunner being able to.
- jimlongton 4y ago
  I suggested reading the linked article. > “Results showed that exposure to manipulated Instagram photos directly led to lower body image.” Engeln, Loach, Imundo, & Zola (2020) Children with vulnerable developing brains being targeted by algorithms designed by teams of engineers and PhDs to exploit human psychology don't stand a chance. You may as well be telling heroin addicts to "just don't get addicted bro". You can show kids /r/Instagramreality/ [1]. I doubt it will help. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/
  - redeeman 4y ago
    > You may as well be telling heroin addicts to "just don't get addicted bro". that makes no sense, it would be more like telling people that are not yet addicted: "dont get addicted bro". and yes, dont fucking get addicted edit: humans are also attracted to fire, we tell kids, "dont stick your fingers into the fire", they learn.

pasquinelli 4y ago

i'll never know how much of those reactions are genuine and how much of them are content.

cwkoss 4y ago
How much of (unrecorded) human behavior is performance vs an expression of the individual self? Can genuine ever be determined deterministically?

ryandrake 4y ago

I like how it tries to fill in male hairlines and gives bald men a generic crewcut. It's the only thing "additive" I saw, the rest just looked like smoothing and brightening filters.

rvz 4y ago

Once again, do not believe anything you see, hear or read on the internet.

darth_avocado 4y ago

Am I the only one that finds this frightening? Adults pretending to be teens is going to open up a whole new can of worms the implications are crazy. Keep in mind this is an app with millions of teens hooked on to it. What’s more terrifying is what happens to explicit material where consenting adults use filters like this? Is the law keeping up with tech like this?

dheera 4y ago
There's not much the law needs to do. People just need to learn that when they open up apps like that they're going into a world full of fake shit. Nothing is real.
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uonpopular_th 4y ago
>What’s more terrifying is what happens to explicit material where consenting adults use filters like this? Is the law keeping up with tech like this? I hope not. I'm sick and tired of everything being illegal because someone finds it yucky.
lelandfe 4y ago
> Adults pretending to be teens Creepy guys have been pretending to be young for internet aeons by simply reposting other young people's content. > what happens to explicit material where consenting adults use filters like this Artwork of CP is still CP in the US, per 18 U.S.C. § 1466A. Whether a face-swapping application constitutes that...?
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  > Artwork of CP is still CP Thank god
- jxramos 4y ago
  indeed a long time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AlDTjiWdKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AlDTjiWdKg

jimmygrapes 4y ago

It does not add pimples and gangliness though

blindriver 4y ago

As a GenX who played with that filter yesterday, I don't understand why anyone's reaction would be to cry. I for one and so very VERY happy I'm not growing up as a young person today. Life today is extremely hard for millenials and Gen Z. I would not trade any amount of time to be young again. I was lucky enough to get into the right career, I am very happy with the set of beliefs and morals I have, which I'm teaching my kids, and I have a house in the Bay Area. If my kids didn't have my wife and I to inherit from, I have no idea how they would ever be able to afford a house. I met my wife during a time when you met face-to-face through friends, and we dated without each other having to be distracted by 24x7 work, phone, or online dating apps. I look at my life and I'm satisfied. I know a lot of my friends are satisfied as well. A lot of millenials and Gen Z that I work with and are friends with had a different world they had to go through, are saddles with 6 figure student debt, no chance of a house, and are lonely. It's not fair and I wish this weren't the case, and I really hope that things like social media go out of fashion by the time my kids are teenagers.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
>> If my kids didn't have my wife and I to inherit from Isn't it a nice feeling when you children impatiently wait for you to kick the bucket)
Dalewyn 4y ago
>are saddles with 6 figure student debt ... and are lonely. While I sympathize with the plights of younger generations, student debt and (mis)use of communication tools are not one of them. Unlike wider problems such as cost of living/housing and geopolitics, student debt and communications are two things completely within your domain of control. You choose to take on debt in the six digits, you choose to use communication tools the way you do. If you don't want crippling debt, don't take out that loan; college isn't the end-all-be-all in life. If the likes of Facebook/Twitter and Discord are making you miserable, just don't use them or change how you use them; life doesn't revolve around social media. Hell, even buying a house is still within the realm of sensiblity if you look beyond the metropolitan areas. There's more to life than permanently connected city life stemming from a college degree.

rexreed 4y ago

Get. Off. Tiktok. Get. Off. Social media. I feel like an old man screaming at kids to get off the lawn. But am I the only one? What's the draw on Tiktok really? I never got it. Then again I never got Twitter either. In my day, we had Usenet for social media and BBSes. And when we cried, it's because we were flamed hard. I have much respect for AI researchers who are some of the most talented in the world, and yet it's cognitive dissonance for me to see them working for social media and advertising companies.

beej71 4y ago
But if you used the filter you could be a young man.
- rexreed 4y ago
  I'd use the double old man filter and look like a raisin screaming at the younguns.
cmckn 4y ago
This isn’t really a TikTok invention, filters like this were popularized on Snapchat years ago. TikTok is primarily a YouTube alternative, and there’s perfectly good content to be found (sometimes in spite of the algorithm). Agree in general, though. Social media is a business for some and for everyone else it’s just mind-games.
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aaron695 4y ago
> I feel like an old man screaming at kids to get off the lawn You are an old man screaming at kids and normal people playing in a park. TikTok is the most non-toxic social media. It's a positive sign we can move forward past Facebook and Twitter. And it's more positive than HN. You don't have old people on TikTok to trying destroy what young people are doing to reclaim their youth.

tablespoon 4y ago

It's kind of interesting how it managed to leave an actual teen's face untouched: https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628765242242072576 https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628765242242072576.

Nowado 4y ago
That is easily the most impressive one to me. Like edge detector applied to a single pixel line or locally exact gaussian distribution under gaussian blur, but abstracted way higher.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  I don't understand why that's so impressive. If the AI is designed to remove wrinkles, and a face has no wrinkles, it wouldn't remove anything.

ModernMech 4y ago

I think this one was pretty insightful: https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628768218381791232 https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628768218381791232 The person says that seeing herself as a teenager basically instantly cured her anxieties from being bullied for being "ugly" as a child. It's not unlike psychedelic users reporting drastic changes in their outlook after a trip. Would be interesting to study this.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

I'm mildly surprised anyone from Generation X would even consider using TikTok.

paxys 4y ago

We need to stop treating random Tweets as news or objective fact. This one person may have been "hit hard" by this filter. Others have not.

DanHulton 4y ago
Should probably RTFA, friend. There's a whole twitter thread full of people taking full-on psychic damage from this filter. It's definitely hitting a significant percentage of people pretty hard.
- paxys 4y ago
  "You shouldn't use a Twitter post as news" "Ah don't worry, there's an entire thread"

Overtonwindow 4y ago

What I love about TikTok filters is how good they are at getting people to show their face. If TikTok is collecting biometrics, they are sure doing a great job at it.

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fbrncci 4y ago

Kind of frightening! I tried it out, and it doesn't look like me, but there is a resemblance to a younger me. Having my "current" me in the other video panel makes it even more shocking. I really understand why people are taken away by this. Imagine this a few years out, where you could feed such a filter pictures of actual younger you. A filter like this could become close to perfect. Now imagine a MMO which takes in all of that ... don't tell Zuck about this idea.

cirrus3 4y ago
yea, training it on some actual photos would really take this up a notch, a huge notch. The reactions would be 1000% more heavy, and they are already pretty heavy
- fbrncci 4y ago
  You could train it on different age ranges too and then use a sliding scale to lock yourself into a particular age. For an MMO this would be pretty cool, reminds me of something black mirror could come up with.
  - chime 4y ago
    Apple, Google, Facebook+Instagram, and Amazon already have every photo of most people since 2010. They can do that today if they decide. For my kids, they have every photo and video since the day they were born. For the newer portrait photos and cinematic videos, they even have depth data.

lakomen 4y ago

Wow this is really amazing. I'll have to try that and also show my 88 year old mom this.

lakomen 4y ago

Where is the filter? I just tried creating a video but what filter is it? Is that a just a hoax?

userbinator 4y ago

All this AI-enhanced imagery has a certain creepy, unsettling unnaturalness to it that I can easily recognise at a glance, but it seems a lot of people unfortunately can't.

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31337Logic 4y ago

It's not right to call this an AI filter. It's amazing how lazy we've been getting with our terminology lately. Every impressive algorithm has the AI label slapped on it.

ilaksh 4y ago
Why don't you go reproduce it and then come back and tell us what type of technique you used. (It will be a machine learning technique, otherwise commonly referred to as AI).

noonething 4y ago

The Mirror of Erised for many people

rvieira 4y ago

It's interesting that there seems to be a core generation target for these kind of things. I remember many years ago, the craze of the "see how you'll look as an old person" filters. Now it's the "see how you'd look as a young person" filter.

jzellis 4y ago

Maybe this hits harder if you're sick or in actual danger of dying young (ish), but... man. I'm not going within a million miles of this filter. I would not want to be young now and participate in the bullshit they feel pressured to participate in, but if you put me back in my body at twenty again, without the blown-out heart and the ruined spine and the trashed rotator cuffs and the bad knees - well, I already had those, thanks to the bumper of a Geo Metro, but still - I think I could find a way to not give a fuck about social media or social expectations or any of that shit. I'd treat that body like somebody just handed me the keys to a Lambo - no more smoking and drinking and doing hard drugs and eating shitty food sitting in front of a computer for decades. I'd go wander the earth like dude in Kung Fu, eating like a hippie and not wasting my time on aspirational capitalist bullshit. Nobody I know wants to be a young person now. But most of us would love to be a middle-aged person in a young person's body.

hokkos 4y ago

I wonder why this filter doesn't work on my Pixel 7 Pro. I don't find any occurrence of this problem on the web.

RicoElectrico 4y ago

The filter is quite simple - brightening and smoothing the skin; apart from that - getting rid of that goddamn "tent" between nose and lips i.e. nasolabial folds. And the wrinkle between your eyebrows. As I'm 30 and people tell me I look younger than I really am, guess this is my sign to take skincare more seriously while I can. I am already halfway there by not smoking and rarely drinking alcohol.

speby 4y ago

I messed around with it. First, it didn't look one bit like myself as a younger me. It was like an artificially blemish-free version and it even tries, haphazardly, to fill in a receding hair line. To be honest, it was funny. I'm sure people's reaction to get teary-eyed have less to do with the literal-ness of the filter and more of a surfacing catharsis deep-down that people have about the passage of time, lost opportunities, distant pain or hurt, disappointment, and also perhaps a nostalgia for once was growing up. It's a pretty human thing.

walt74 4y ago

I just wrote a piece on this thread: https://goodinternet.substack.com/p/teenage-kicks https://goodinternet.substack.com/p/teenage-kicks In an age of wishful mnemonics, be careful what you fish for.