Is it Live or is it Digital?

We are rapidly approaching the point where you will not be able to tell the difference between what is real and what is not, at least when you turn on your TV or your computer. We all know it’s coming, but we don’t really want to think about it.

On the Tonight Show, they often show funny videos where they substitute another guy’s head on someone’s body doing something stupid for comic effect, often a political jab. These are really crude, quickly done and easily identified as constructs, which actually adds to the humor. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in the film “Simone” the director, played by Al Pacino, inherited a totally digitized actress, originally dubbed “Sim One” who he proceeded to turn into an onscreen star that the world thought was a real person. The futuristic software allowed Simone to say anything and do anything the director wanted her to do. She never got tired, never complained, and of course never appeared in public.

Making the leap from the crude constructs on the Tonight Show to the believable realism of Simone is an enormous technical challenge. We’re not talking here about the realistic animation you see in movies today; what we’re talking about here is a digital creation where you simply cannot tell that the performance on the screen wasn’t created by a real actor. It’s a bit like the famous Turing intelligence test where you define intelligence by the computer’s ability to fool the human into thinking that they are talking to another human. This is of course much harder to create, requiring the programmer to generate all the visual clues, body language if you will, that we expect to see in a real person.

We can already digitally edit still photographs fairly easily using any number of low cost digital editing programs. Photoshop Elements is a perfect example. With a little practice, you can remove people from a picture, switch heads, change backgrounds, etc. and it would take an expert to tell that it’s a doctored photo.

So, what happens when we approach that milestone where a digital video can be edited to change someone’s identity, or the next step, create an entire persona from 1’s and 0’s? Will the lawyers append a legal disclaimer at the end of each movie saying in effect that you shouldn’t necessarily believe what you just saw?

Will there be cameos of dead actors appearing in new movie releases? Will we be able to watch new episodes of “The Ed Sullivan Show” with the Beatles playing new songs just written? How much will it cost to have yourself digitized and uploaded into the cast of the next “Cirque du Soleil?” How soon will performances tout the fact that they include real live people?

For all those people pulling their hair out today over Intellectual Property Rights in the digital age, you may want to consider hypnosis to kick that habit.

You are now entering, The Twilight Zone.