Machiavelli knows how to sell high-tech products to mainstream consumers – TIzumMO #7

Machiavelli would have known how to sell high-tech products to mainstream consumers

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Hi {name}, as you noticed by now, I switched to English. The simple reason is that I’m convinced that everyone of my readers understands English perfectly. And with the growing numbers of colleagues and friends from other countries, I want the newsletter to be as accessible as possible. And I’m aware that my English eloquence is far behind my German. But we all have to live with this now.

Last friday the annually Media Innovation Camp happened, this time of course virtually. And they solved the adaption of the biggest incentive for events, which obviously is free food, by giving everyone a Lieferando voucher. Well done!

The topic of my session was about challenges in rolling out analytics dashboards and tools. And I wanted to combine Moore’s chasm model and Machiavelli’s political tactics for a long time. You can read about those specific aspects in my recent blog post. Please leave a comment if you enjoyed the article so I know if I should do more of those or not!

Incredible deepfake of YouTuber KSI

Another thing I stumbled upon lately and discussed with friends was a very good deepfake of UK YouTube creator KSI.

Obviously deepfakes are quite old already. There were a lot of tech-demos in the past and also some incredible results. But I never saw one in a completely normal context like a video of an YouTube creator. And honestly really I love KSI’s reaction. You see everything from the excitement of him being in Black Panther all to the fear of what people could use his face for.

Back in 2016 there was already a demo of an Adobe application called Voco, which was able to create speech from text. The special thing was that every voice was possible, as long as you have a sample of it. No problem at all with actors or influencers of course, but also easy when you think of all the WhatsApp voice messages available from all of us. Apparently this raised many concerns and after some time it went quite around the product.

But obviously this will not be the end of it and creating face and voice of other people, making them say anything you want, is something we will live with in the future. And when I think of our current pandemic and how people actively want to believe crazy things despite contradicting evidence, those easily accessible technologies can mess with the public discurse even more. But perhaps it’s just the next step of having cameos in movies, like putting KSI into Black Panther 2 without having him to fly to the set at all. Fingers crossed!