Is it just me?

I should have made my question clearer. Does the living man Bashar al Assad resemble, in any way, the now dead Donald Pleasance who was photographed when he was about the same age as Assad now?

 

Yes, definitely.

 

No I don't think that they are that similar in appearence.

 

I think it's the eyes.

 

Same beedy eyes and snout.

No its the snout.

 

I’d say the nose and lips.

 

What sort of a world are we living in? I know very very little about AI, but my eye fell on this article and I was horrified.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/03/business/meta-ai-accounts-instagram-facebook/index.html

 

Why?

 

The deliberate invention of fictitious people of a certain type by a huge international corporation that gathers data on people. I put your question back to you - why? The cynic in me says that they encourage innocent real people to engage in innocent conversations (much as we are doing here) and to give out their likes, dislikes, places of origin, religious, political and sexual orientations, not to another real person but to an information gathering computer. Their reason for setting up these fictitious beings was to test AI. Oh yes? And I’m a monkey’s uncle.

 

In the article you linked the examples there do not state they are not AI; so even if you use those social platforms you can choose not to interact with these obvious fictions.
If it horrifies you then don't use Facebook or Instagram.
A lot of companies have beta testing of development products to try and iron out possible problems.
Given the propensity of humans for breaking things how do you produce durable product without humans testing the prototypes.

 

Interesting, but I've always believed this to be the wrong way round and the Monkey should be your Uncle as from an evolutionary point of view this is roughly correct and you've only missed out several hundred greats.

 

I have never subscribed to Facebook or Instagram, or any other one of these ghastly gossip columns. But I am horrified to think what information about other people is being gathered and used for political ends.

In fact, I cannot literally be anyone’s uncle as I am not male. There’s a piece of information for the bots to scribble down in the little notebooks.

 

I'm not sure that's a barrier these days.

 

Now this is horrifying.
https://xkcd.com/3033/

 

I'm not so bothered by fishing for food - the animals have a natural life and are hopefully dispatched quickly. But the catch and release fishing seems really cruel to me. The fish is yanked out of the water by a hook through its lip - they claim the lip has no feeling - and then allowed to gasp and struggle whilst being weighted/photographed/posed with, and then thrown back in to suffer the whole thing again another day.