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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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This is just going to lead either to more in person dating or more ‘biometric verification’ using a combination of ID and facial scan / FaceID type data. The latter still leaves room for trickery, but that just makes the former more likely. I understand that among zoomers dating app usage is already falling off a cliff. People have apparently moved to Instagram, which is much messier, network-based and features the ability to see pictures of someone they didn’t curate.

Thanks to living in the genteel-authoritarianism that is Britain, I've made my peace with every app and their mother asking for biometrics and scanning my face.

Obvious fraud will be caught, and as is, you need to generate 20 pictures for 1 that'll pass to a casual onlooker, closer to a hundred to be imperceptible to someone who knows you.

People have apparently moved to Instagram, which is much messier, network-based and features the ability to see pictures of someone they didn’t curate.

I'm mildly annoyed that Google is being so laissez-faire about things and letting any idiot who asks into their dev preview. I'm no dev, but I was there years before it was cool. Expect everyone to know about this soonish, and adopt it faster than earlier AI image gen models.

Far more people want flattering photos for insta than want to pass off AI art as their own, which is currently the primary use case barring artistic expression and catfishing schemes. You don't even need to learn how to make a LORA or fine-tune a model, just supply a few pics and ask nicely.