Have you heard of the story of the Cottingley Fairies?
Search it when you can till the time Google gives you normal non fake results!
Now this is an interesting story!
The Cottingley Fairies are the subjects of a story which was supposed to provide evidence of the existence of fairies!
They appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9.
The photos and the expressions were so real and genuine and it was the early days of photography! So much so that even the author of the super intelligent Sherlock Holmes was taken in!
The pictures came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Doyle was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of supernatural phenomena!
Of course like every other thing many believed it to be genuine and many fake!
Finally in the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked, using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular children’s book of the time, but Frances maintained that the fifth and final photograph was genuine!
The other day an influencer had posted her ‘photo’ in a different attire somewhere different than her usual place! Later she confessed that only the face was her own! The Google Gemini flash had simply pasted her face perfectly on to another person (or even created that who knows!) and generated an image which looked so real!
You also have AI generated videos which needs only your voice matching to even create videos of anyone and everyone with amazing clarity and precision that you would be shocked!
The Cottingley Fairies story happened in the 1920s while the AI fake image generation is happening in the 2020s! As far as technology is concerned, we have now come a full circle! With a few words and some skill you can have an image generated, a tune created and even a song generated! With a little more skill you can even make an AI generated movie starring even yourself! No one can tell which is real and which is AI!
The only thing which is genuine is what you see and touch with your own eyes without any screen in between!
You may even feel that this blog and the sketch is AI generated! Then you see the flaws and the imperfections! Then you know it is Human!
If it is perfect then just know that it is not real! Real perfection of the musical kind was the duo of Raamlaxman! One of them was Vijay Patil! Both made real non AI music!
Now stop your virtual sleep and sleep for real!
SHubh ratri!
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