2 charts and 7 snacks for you today:
After emerging from obscurity back in 2018, deepfakes — which use machine learning and AI to create hyper-realistic fake images and videos of people — are once again capturing people's attention. The latest example doing the rounds is a creepy fake Tom Cruise, who is on TikTok as @deeptomcruise doing magic tricks and playing golf — and honestly if you didn't tell us it was fake, we're not sure we would have known.
The fact that deepfakes have gotten so good is perhaps no surprise. Academic papers citing the word deepfake have exploded, and global interest on Google has remained elevated ever since 2018.
Still fun, for now
Back in 2019 a mobile app called FaceApp exploded in popularity, generating highly realistic face transformations that were a great source of silly entertainment for millions of people. That virality didn't last long, as legitimate privacy concerns cropped up over the app's use of personal data. Since then, similar apps such as Reface have emerged, which is probably the closest deepfake technology has gotten to really "going mainstream".
The risk that a deepfake video is used to misinform millions of people is one that, fortunately, has yet to come to bear — but it feels increasingly likely. The good news is that a majority of the academic papers that mention deepfakes also mention "deepfake detection", suggesting an awareness among researchers that it is going to be an important field.One such company involved in deepfake detection, Cyabra, identified that Oliver Taylor, a supposed freelance journalist from England, was probably completely made up — and that his half-dozen articles and blog posts were actually written by someone else.
Let's hope deepfake producers stick to getting followers on TikTok.
US stock markets fell almost 2.5% yesterday, as fears about rising inflation spread from the bond market into stocks. In more normal times, a fall of that magnitude would usually rank among the worst days in a year — but not since the pandemic. The fall yesterday is actually only the 23rd worst day since the start of 2020, and it is still nothing on the ~12% drop that happened on March 16th 2020 when panic gripped investors at the beginning of the pandemic.
Stocks only go up?
Tech stocks got hit particularly hard yesterday. Apple fell 3.5%, Facebook3.6%, Airbnb was down 9% and Tesla fell 8%. For retail investors that have piled into tech stocks since the start of the year, this probably came as a shock to the system after so many days in the green.
Whether yesterday proves to be just another minor hiccup on the unrelenting upward march that tech stocks have been on, or something more serious, is probably going to depend on the actual inflation data. Investors have been expecting higher inflation for a while — something we wrote about 2 weeks ago — but it's yet to really show up in a significant way; meaning that it's going to be all eyes on the next inflation data release (March 10th, bet you can't wait).
One stock that didn't go down yesterday was — you guessed it — GameStop. Much to the delight of traders on Reddit, GME shares gained another 18%, taking the stock back over $100, the highest it has been for a number of weeks but still a far cry from the $347 the shares closed at back in January.
1) Twitter has taken a big leap into the world of the creator economy, announcing that for the first time, users will be able to hide certain pieces of content behind a paywall reserved only for "Super Followers".
2) NASA's Perseverance rover has sent back its first 360-degree panorama photo of the surface of Mars.
3) The books behind the Netflix series Bridgerton are enjoying an enormous boost in popularity, currently occupying 4 out of the top 10 spots on the New York Times Best Seller list.
4) Dispo, a photo-sharing app designed to mimic disposable cameras and founded by internet celebrity David Dobrik, has just raised $20m at a $200m valuation.
5) Coinbase, the cryptocurrency trading platform, has filed for a direct listing. The company reportedly has more than 40 million users and posted $1.3bn in revenue last year. They also announced they would no longer have a headquarters located in any one city, calling themselves a "decentralised company". All very on brand.
6) Some delicious charts from dataviz guru Neil Kaye on the frequency of letter use in English words, and where each letter most frequently occurs within each word.
7) MIT Technology Review has published their list of 10 breakthrough technologies for 2021.
