Tag: Star Wars

What Star Wars means as a space fantasy

One thing that always bothered me about Star Wars after reading the Dark Horse comics all those years ago was how technology seemed to develop in an incredibly glacial pace even after thousands of years.

It forced me to eventually reconcile that Star Wars is not science fiction and cannot be science fiction but a high tech fantasy or space opera story set in space where technology plays a significant part in society but the people are not too concerned with its advancement.

In the same spirit, a story that takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away where anti gravity machines are common, telekinetic powers are commonplace, floating sky cities exist, interstellar ships can travel great distances as if they’re regular buses or planes, and invisible elements of nature can be used to affect physical reality and corporeal objects should not be held to the same laws of physics that shape our reality.

Once you can accept that it’s a story about space wizards with flashlights that can cut metal, and let go of the notion that the story should follows rules that govern our reality, it’s a lot easier to be immersed and enjoy what’s being presented to us.

Doesn’t mean the story can be without flaws, though. It wouldn’t be Star Wars without cringe dialogs and bad story telling with plot holes that get patched on the fly that’s been a fixture since 1977.

AI voice detection and recognition are becoming more crucial

This Twitter thread shows how far along artificial voices have come. For those who are familiar with Steve Jobs’ voice, the voice in these recordings is almost indistinguishable from the original. When you listen to them, you can be forgiven to think that it’s actually Steve Jobs saying these words, never mind that he’s been gone for more than a decade.

The only catch is that because the training set must have been taken from the many recordings of his Apple keynote speeches and product announcements, they all sound like he’s reading from a script or making announcements. None of the sentences sound natural the way someone would speak if they were having a regular conversation or answering questions but that’s not too difficult to overcome. The tools to make adjustments to AI generated voices to sound more natural already exists.

Here’s another example. The YouTube channel Star Wars Comics have started to experiment with using generated voices to narrate some storyline’s from the Star Wars comic books to keep their audience up to date with what’s happening in the comics. In one video, they used James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader voice to say the lines in the pages of the comic book. Their latest video voiced a conversation between Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader from another issue in the recent Darth Vader comic book series, both using the generated voices of their real actors.

As many in the comments noted, while their voices sound indistinguishable from the original, the speech patterns make it obvious that these were generated. That’s because the voices weren’t adjusted to the way a person would speak in a proper conversation given in the situation. Again, these are relatively trivial changes that one could make using their AI voice generators.

While these may be little more than fun projects for the curious minds, the day when someone can create entirely fabricated recordings to manipulate the public is already here. You can already create fake videos of a person saying things that they never actually said, now the voices sound even closer to the original.

When deepfake videos started popping up in 2020, people knew that this was going to be a significant problem. People are already easily fooled by fabricated articles or stories and this is just going to make it far more challenging for people to fact check and verify the validity of recordings.

All I can say for that is, brace for impact.

michaelfirman:

Rey-a-Day #24: Renegades of Junk

youneedapiilot:

surrealistadventurer:

hellotailor:

vaspider:

youneedapiilot:

-spends easily 15 minutes trying to figure out what Poe’s flight vest says-

-gets mad cause it doesn’t match the aurebesh letters exactly-

-figures out the ones I can recognize are upside down-

-flips the whole thing upside down to figure out it is legit upside down and backwards-

And the verdict? You’ll love this. This 15+ minute project has brought this result:

So there you go. What the mystery writing on X-wing pilots’ vests actually says. Your welcome.

Omg this is the kind of high quality content I fucking want.

@judicialmistrangementorder you need to see this.

you’re doing important work here, @youneedapiilot

Absolutely astounding @youneedapiilot, bravo. 👏👏👏

Omg the notes on this has gotten out of control wtf

use-the-force-rey:

kylocanyougo:

han: making my way downtown
han: walking fast
*sees kylo*
han: *hiding face in jacket* walking faster

kylo: *sees han* 

therealraewest:

Okay but in the new star wars there’s that super serious Rey scene when she goes to the basement but I can never focus on her because of BB-8 in the background very carefully going down one stair at a time like BB-8 ur round please don’t do stairs at dramatic moments

😂😂😂😂😂

nevver:

Calvin and Hobbes awaken, Brian Kesinger

Source: instagram.com

sniffyjenkins:

webofstarwars:

Calvin and Hobbes inspired The Force Awakens art by Brian Kesinger

omg

Source: twitter.com

superherofeed:

This has gone too damn far.

Poor Slip

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