Megabots Mad Rad Blog

                                                                           "What are deepfakes -- and how can you spot them?"  This reading really widened my eyes because it aligns perfectly with a trend on TikTok right now. This past week, my "For You Page" on TikTok has been filled with artificial intelligence videos of well known celebrities like Jake Paul, doing funny, unlikely, things. But the alarming part of this trend is that the videos are incredibly realistic. Often times I catch myself not even realizing the videos are AI, and feeding into the content. Deepfakes use AI to create realistic but fake videos, images, or audio. They make it look like someone is doing or saying something that never happened. These are usually aimed at celebrities or influe...

                                                                                      "Panopticism" from Discipline and Punish I feel like I often forget the organization of power, and how it structures my behavior everyday. Foucault's discussion of panopticism created a strong connection between the organization of power to everyday life. What started out as an illness outbreak in town, the Plague illustrates the shift of people no longer just being punished after misbehaving, but now being monitored to prevent it. Once seen as parts of a house, windows, doors, and streets, became spaces of surveillance. The emphasis was on controlling actions before disorder could even occur, and the idea of visible punishment seemed to disappear...

                                                                                            "Seeing Ourselves Through Technology" One thing I couldn't look over in this reading is how Rettberg illustrates how seamlessly surveillance has threaded itself into everyday life. She traces surveillance all the way back to when it was used as a tool of social order, such as early identification documents, and how that has turned into something far more invasive with digital technology's rising power. What may appear as simple data collection, quickly turns into a method of control. This ties back to Foucault's idea of panopticism, Rettberg highlights the idea that even if we don't know when or if we are being watched, the po...