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What Do My Screenshots and Selfies Actually Say About Me?

What Do My Screenshots and Selfies Actually Say About Me?

“While looking through my parents’ old photo albums, I noticed that they had lots of pictures of friends gathered together. It made me think about the camera roll on my phone, which is full of screenshots and selfies. Why don’t I take pictures with my friends?”

—Say Cheese


Dear Cheese,

All modern technologies bend toward self-referentiality. Long before the birth of the smartphone, the earliest screenshots required actually pointing a camera at a television or computer screen, an act that (for those who can remember it) recalled the repelling force of two like-charged magnets, or the nauseating infinite regress of two mirrors facing each other. Part of you half-expected a black hole to swallow you up, punishment for having summoned some elusive paradox in the universe.

We now live full-time in that Escherian fun house, spending more of our lives on phones that serve as both the object and channel of our attention. Some years ago, back when AI lacked its current powers of discernment, my mom got a kick out of sending me the deranged “Memories” that her iPhone culled from her camera roll. As the tinkly, inspirational music crescendoed, the slideshows reliably displayed photos of her friends and grandchildren before concluding with screenshots of confirmation codes and bathroom faucets from Home Depot’s website.

Although it’s little commented on, the screenshot bears a curious symmetry to the selfie—in its eschewal of the rear-facing camera and its memorialization of solitude. A writer for Vice dubbed the screenshot “the faceless selfie … a way to share what happens when we’re alone on the internet.” Perhaps this gets at the note of self-incrimination I sense in your question. The camera roll contains the receipts of our attention, evidence of how we have opted to spend our mortal hours. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Christ said, a proverb that insists all collections are a synecdoche for one’s soul.

When your private gallery becomes a mirror of your data trail and images of your own face, it’s easy to fear that your life has been whittled down to a pinpoint of frenetic, solipsistic attention—that what you are choosing to look at is yourself in the act of looking.

But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. For one thing, taking photos of other people has become impossibly fraught. Or maybe it always was. “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1977’s On Photography. There is more than a whiff of violence in the very terminology we use to describe the camera’s function (to “shoot,” to “capture”), and casual photography has become even more intrusive now that the economic incentives of the digital economy have turned experience into a commodity. In a moment when it’s widely understood that group selfies require verbal consent, when any image can be publicly posted, altered, or fed into generative algorithms to produce deepfakes, taking candid photos at an intimate gathering has become a quasi-hostile act.

But the content of your camera roll might also speak to the existential purpose of such images. Photos are, at root, an attempt to stop time—to halt and contain the feed of experience that relentlessly passes through us. The point of the old family photo album was not merely to collect as many images as possible, but to draw a firm perimeter around a year that was overfull with experience, marking the important milestones—the child’s baptism, the summer vacation—that will make it legible in the collective memory. The camera roll on your phone offers a similar promise, but creating a narrative with coherence depends on its finitude. For many of us, the camera roll serves as a new kind of contact sheet that will inevitably undergo further winnowing before it is posted publicly on social platforms. (The performative carelessness of the photo dump, a quiet mutiny against aspirational content, is, as many critics have pointed out, a self-conscious act of curation in disguise.)

All of which is to say: If your camera roll is full of digital footprints, this may simply be evidence that life online is moving faster than your offline existence—that the need to shape chaos into a coherent narrative feels more urgent in the realm of infinite scrolls than it does in the clearly marked hours you experience IRL. Whereas for the modernists, life was a bustling frenzy of activity that could be captured only by breathless stream of consciousness, for us, ordinary offline existence seems slow or even static in comparison to the pace of the news cycle or the speed with which viral stories and digital trends appear and then fade into the void of history.

After spending hours on the internet, experiencing time as sheer free fall, it is a shock to look up from your screen and find the world around you—the plants, the chairs, your friends and family—as unchanged as a still life painting. This uncanny permanence fails to spark the acquisitive impulse in us.

Marvel’s VFX Workers Have Moved to Unionize—and It’s a Huge Deal for Hollywood

Marvel’s VFX Workers Have Moved to Unionize—and It’s a Huge Deal for Hollywood

One of the many knock-on effects of Marvel making post-credit scenes a feature of the studio’s cinematic universe is that fans get a glimpse of just how many “below-the-line” workers it takes to make all that superhero movie magic. Production designers, hair and makeup folks, camera operators, the lists run on and on. Amongst them, usually toward the end, as theatergoers are eagerly anticipating that tease for the next MCU movie, are lists of the visual effects studios—places with names like Framestore, The Third Floor, Cinesite—that created all of those space scenes and Wakanda visuals. But unlike most of the other names in those credits, the ones attached to VFX artists have never been in a professional union.

On Monday, some folks at Marvel made a move to change that, with a supermajority of Marvel Studios’ VFX crew signing cards saying they want to be represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).

To be clear, the Marvel team is a small faction of a huge industry and doesn’t represent all those outside VFX houses that also work on MCU films. But their move marks a huge shift in Hollywood at a time when people in other industry unions—the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA)—are on strike to get better deals with the major studios. VFX workers have been talking about unionizing for more than a decade, says Bilali Mack, a VFX supervisor who has worked on everything from The Whale to The Flash. The fact that one group, albeit a small one, has taken steps to unionize is “huge,” he says.

This moment has roots in 2013, when Life of Pi won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects just as the company that worked on those effects, Rhythm & Hues, was facing bankruptcy. When the movie’s VFX supervisor, Bill Westenhofer, took the stage to accept his award he said the traditional thank yous and then added “Sadly, Rhythm & Hues is suffering severe financial difficulties right now. I urge you all to remember …”—at which point his mic was cut off and the theme from Jaws began to play.

Rhythm & Hues wasn’t the only VFX studio facing troubles. Some 21 similar companies shuttered between 2003 and 2013, due in part to production delays and the fact that many jobs were going to companies based outside the US, where tax subsidies and incentives give VFX houses a better shot at survival. Attempts to organize have been bubbling up ever since, and this week they bubbled over. “We are witnessing an unprecedented wave of solidarity that’s breaking down old barriers in the industry,” IATSE president Matthew Loeb said in a statement. “That doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

AI Can Give You an NPC That Remembers. It Could Also Get Your Favorite Artist Fired

AI Can Give You an NPC That Remembers. It Could Also Get Your Favorite Artist Fired

AI’s presence in the gaming industry has evolved from a mere novelty to an indispensable force. With every algorithmic breakthrough, new possibilities and challenges arise for gamers and developers alike.

In March 2023, a Reddit user shared a story of how AI was being used where she worked. “I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney overnight,” the author wrote. The post got a lot of attention, and its author agreed to talk to WIRED on condition of anonymity, out of fear of being identified by her employer.

“I was able to get a huge dopamine rush from nailing a pose or getting a shape right. From having this ‘light bulb moment’ when I suddenly understood a form, even though I had drawn it hundreds of times before,” says Sarah (not her real name), a 3D artist who works in a small video game company.

Sarah’s routine changed drastically with version 5 of Midjourney, an AI tool that creates images from text prompts. Midjourney has also been widely criticized for violating copyright of visual artists and stealing their work in order to train its image generation engine, criticism that’s led to a massive copyright lawsuit.

When Sarah started working in the gaming industry, she says, there was high demand for 3D environmental and character assets, all of which designers built by hand. She says she spent 70 percent of her time in a 3D motion capture suit and 20 percent in conceptual work; the remaining time went into postprocessing. Now the workflow involves no 3D capture work at all.

Her company, she explains, found a way to get good and controllable results using Midjourney with images taken from the internet fed to it, blending existing images, or simply typing a video game name for a style reference into the prompt. “Afterwards, most outputs only need some Photoshopping, fixing errors, and voilà: The character that took us several weeks before now takes hours—with the downside of only having a 2D image of it,” says Sarah. “It’s efficiency in its final form. The artist is left as a clean-up commando, picking up the trash after a vernissage they once designed the art for,” she adds.

“Not only in video games, but in the entire entertainment industry, there is extensive research on how to cut development costs with AI,” says Diogo Cortiz, a cognitive scientist and professor at the Pontifícia Universidade de São Paulo. Cortiz worries about employment opportunities and fair compensation, and he says that labor rights and regulation in the tech industry may not match the gold rush that’s been indicative of AI adoption. “We cannot outsource everything to machines. If we let them take over creative tasks, not only are jobs less fulfilling, but our cultural output is weakened. It can’t be all about automation and downsizing,” he says, adding that video games reflect and shape society’s values.

Cortiz says that gaming companies must, either as an industry or individually, collaboratively discuss AI, its usage, where it should be applied, and how far it can go. “The committees need to have diversity in terms of gender, age, class, and ethnicity, to discuss and create a more inclusive AI,” he says. “They need to make their AI principles available to everyone.” He adds that gamers should have access to how companies use AI so there can be greater transparency, trust, and more developed digital literacy on the topic.

In practice, that means companies should disclose the AI tools employed in games and make their AI committee available to write public reports and answer questions from all stakeholders involved in a video game—developers, players, and investors.

Labor-Saving or Labor-Crushing?

“Incorporation of AI in our workflows relies on three axes: creating more believable worlds, reducing the number of low-value tasks for our creators, and improving the player experience,” says Yves Jacquier, executive director of Ubisoft La Forge.

Jacquier describes several ways that his company is already experimenting with AI, from smoother AI-driven motion transitions in Far Cry 6, which make the game look more natural, to the bots designed to improve the new player experience in Rainbow Six Siege. There’s also Ghostwriter, an AI-powered tool that allows scriptwriters to create a character and a type of interaction they would like to generate and offers them several variations to choose from and edit.

One of Gaming’s Biggest YouTubers Wants to Replace Himself With AI

One of Gaming’s Biggest YouTubers Wants to Replace Himself With AI

“In this industry, it’s like you’re starting this company, but the company solely relies on this one individual to be able to perform,” he says. “And that is absolutely a horrible business model. It’s way too high-risk.”

Van Den Bussche and his creative team began trying to reverse engineer what made creators successful. “We started testing a lot of theories on this,” he says. “We needed evidence: How much does the voice influence the performance with the fans? How much does the face influence it? How much does the content influence it?”

In April 2021, Van Den Bussche launched a YouTube channel with a virtual YouTuber (vtuber) called Bloo that he developed, powered by AI. Since then, Bloo has gained 775,000 subscribers, with each video watched by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of viewers. “He’s a completely virtual influencer with a protocol and set steps and a bunch of AI and machine learning applications involved in the system,” he says. “Now we’re applying that model to my IP and my friends’. It includes voice cloning, so it sounds like me.”

The Kwebbelkop videos made by AI—the first of which dropped on Tuesday—are powered by models trained on Van Den Bussche’s existing content. “It’s modeled after me and my creativity and my input,” he says. “Everyone thinks I’m retiring as a creator and letting this AI run, but I’m not retiring as a creative.”

While not retiring, Van Den Bussche is happy to replace himself in the creative process with the AI he’s been working on. “We’ve seen a lot of success with these systems,” he says. “I’m very confident that they can reproduce creativity—so much so that I’m willing to bet my entire business on it.” As of this writing, the AI video he released Tuesday has nearly 3,000 views. He claims to have a wait list of 500 influencer friends within the industry eager to adopt his AI tools, though he can’t give them access until the cost of creating new videos drops to an economical level, which he believes will happen as technology advances.

“This presents an entirely new option for creators to essentially clone themselves and continue without worrying about aging, gaining weight, or otherwise evolving in any way that could alienate certain segments of their audience,” says Lia Haberman, an influencer marketing expert and instructor at UCLA.

However, Haberman isn’t fully convinced audiences will want to embrace AI-generated creators as readily as the creators themselves are. Their appeal “is their humanity and ability to create these parasocial relationships with their audience where people either relate to them or aspire to become them,” she says. “A virtual influencer will only ever present as entertainment, at least until we get to sentient beings.”

Nevertheless, Van Den Bussche hopes that it’ll encourage those who previously stepped away from online video because of the stresses involved. “That’s the one really big use case we’re focusing on right now,” he says. “People who have an existing brand, want to continue this existing brand, but are facing a human problem like the one we had. Every YouTuber and every influencer who has ever retired has experienced that,” he says.

The Real Reason Steph Curry Is So Damn Good

The Real Reason Steph Curry Is So Damn Good

In looking over the footage for the doc, was there anything that surprised you?

Curry: I guess the one thing that surprised me was how bad my first college game was. Because I tell the story—I’ve told the story all the time. Like you saw, you can hear, “He had 13 turnovers in this game.” And Coach had to make a decision, do I keep playing him or bench him? He could have made or broken my college career at that moment. But it was worse than I remember.

How do you go about forgiving yourself for a bad performance or a bad mistake?

Curry: It’s easier to move on to the next thing as long as you’re not cheating the process. In terms of learning the lessons you need to learn, you need to be honest with yourself, vulnerable with yourself. I know human nature is powerful, the mind is a powerful thing. You can’t be afraid of failure, you can’t be afraid of the negative outcome.

Coogler: I try to do analysis. If I have a failure, I see if there was any points where I could have done better. Was it anywhere where I had an inkling and went against it? Or I didn’t do something I knew I should have done?

I got Panther shot in maybe 100 or 117 days, or something like that. Not all of them 117 days I was efficient. So, after a day when we didn’t really get what we needed, it’s like alright, cool, well, what happened? Did you not have a shot list? Did you not talk to the actors? Some days you might get rained out. You can’t control that. And like Steph’s saying, you gotta be in honesty with yourself like, man, did I do everything I was supposed to do? Could I have been better? But the thing is, you got to get excited and say, “I’ma fix it tomorrow.”

Peyton: So, I’ma be real.

Yeah, please. I hope everyone’s being real.

Peyton: There’s this irrational confidence that both Steph and I have.

Curry: You’re a maverick.

Peyton: In my day-to-day life, I’m constantly examining how I can be a better husband, father, all those things. As a producer, I think the idea is to work as hard as you can to make this thing better. But once that thing is there, to me, it’s beautiful. It’s almost like a baby coming out. No matter the scars or whatever, to me it is beautiful. Because, before, that thing did not exist. So now that it exists, it is beautiful.

Steph has said that faith is an important part of his life. The documentary, in that vein, feels almost spiritual.

Curry: There’s the old saying that I’m not smacking people over the head with the Bible or trying to force anybody to adopt a belief. It’s about identifying, what makes you unique? What do you tap into? That is like a superpower.

Coogler: In a way for me, like, [long, long pause] it’s like, the film is like, constantly in conversation with fate.

Curry: You said “fate”?

Coogler: Fate. Like, I think about, what if that didn’t happen? What if Coach McKillop didn’t leave him in that [first college] game? And didn’t play him in the second game? I think he was signaling to Steph and to Davidson, and to everybody, “I didn’t pick him up for a player he is going to be. I picked him up for right now. [Bangs the table] You don’t sit on a bench man. ‘I’ll put you back in when you ready?’ No. Right now. You’re ready right now, even if you think you not ready, I’m gonna show you that you are.” And that? Well, that changed basketball. Not benching that freshman changed the way we play basketball.