Journal 9

I liked how the presentations were connected this week. It was interesting to see how The Greatest Showman portrayed P. T. Barnum within the lens of the American Dream and almost as a hero for all the people that were in his show. The movie did demonstrate how he twisted reality around the people's backgrounds and conditions to generate more curiosity, but it left out how a lot of those explanations played to racist stereotypes. I enjoyed the activity where we guessed how he advertised the different circus entertainers. It was interesting to see how some were easy to guess and how he strayed from his pattern with others like the really tall woman. About a week ago, I saw this ad for a company named Synthesia that allow you to make training videos but with deepfakes. I found it intriguing, because we had talked about the growing ease of making deepfakes earlier in the semester. I looked up the company and watched a short video about them from a few years ago, and it was weird. You can use premade avatars or create your own to speak your script. Additionally, in the video, the man uses it to also make a video for his email thanking a coworker. It was almost like they saw the complaints people had about Gen Z's shortening attention span and declining reading comprehension before making the commercial. Rather than creating a solution that fixes the problem, this idea almost seems to perpetuate it. I agree it might be useful for training modules, however I think using a video is more important than specifically a talking avatar. I feel like I have also seen more ads not just advertising AI use but that are also made with AI even on things like Netflix or local news networks. There was one that was a Jim Adler and Associates commercial, and there was one that was of a family and their great Texan house (that one was more creepy while the first one just looked silly).

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