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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Alex Hern

TechScape: Could AI-generated content be dangerous for our health?

Deepfake imagery is getting harder to discern, even by experts.
Deepfake imagery is getting harder to discern, even by experts. Illustration: Guardian Design

Let’s talk about sci-fi.

Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash is the book that launched a thousand startups. It was the first book to use the Hindu term avatar to describe a virtual representation of a person, it coined the term “metaverse”, and was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s pieces of required reading for new executives at Facebook a decade before he changed the focus of the entire company to attempt to build Stephenson’s fictional world in reality.

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