After Maryland singer-songwriter Father John Misty (Joshua Tillman) performed "Total Entertainment Forever" on the Saturday Night Live stage in March, he had to face massive internet outrage over the song's opening verses: 'Bedding Taylor Swift/ Every night inside the Oculus Rift'. Much of the indignation and criticism was levied at his perceived intentions for name-dropping the reigning pop sensation (i.e. fame-baiting and confessional lewdness) - especially in the wake of Kanye West's "Famous", with its Swift-interpolating lyrics and music video - rather than the point the song itself was making. In a subsequent interview with , he painstakingly explained that he was aiming to reflect the ethical concerns that would inevitably arise from modern society's insatiable appetite for entertainment and the increasingly sophisticated technological means it would be able to employ to satisfy it:
"Human civilizations have been entertaining themselves in disgusting ways all through human history — I mean, whether it's lighting Christians on fire, or whatever. We have to consider that maybe there are ways in which we entertain ourselves now that are equally as disturbing. I think that that's important — to not assume that everything about the way we live is the direct product of progress."
On Dec 12, Motherboard's Samantha Cole reported that the problematic future that Tillman foresaw is already upon us. Through the use of open-source machine learning tools, an anonymous creator with the handle name "deepfakes" has deployed a machine learning algorithm that scours Google images, stock photos and YouTube videos to map a celebrity's face onto the body of a porn actress (presumably one of similar physical proportions). This realistic digital face swap has produced fake porn videos of celebrities such as Gal Gadot, Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Aubrey Plaza, and ... Taylor Swift. While Tillman referred to the use of virtual reality for similar ends in the song, he pointed out that the "face recognition stuff" already available late last year would only unleash the "angry ecstasy freaks" among - and within - us.
The ethical and moral debates over these emerging forms of cybersex - as well as the prospect of real sex with robots and human-sized dolls - are likely to intensify in the near future. In the meantime, we are left to meditate's Tillman's Cassandra-esque lamentations: "The fact of the matter is, I don't want that to happen to Taylor Swift. That is the worst thing I can think of; that is so horrible [...] Oh God, it's just, how many different ways do human beings need to masturbate?" And if you are in an ironic enough mood, you can contemplate the flipside of this questionable tech wizardry: 'Not bad for a race of demented monkeys/ From a cave to a city to a permanent party'.
