There's also Hatsune Miku, a Japanese singer created in software:
New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
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Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#12There's also Hatsune Miku, a Japanese singer created in software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTXO7KGHtjI
Miku is the polar opposite though -- she's a character that anyone can use to create their own albums, merchandise, comics, and so forth. The real product is the software itself, which the character has, of course, so effectively promoted.
Effectively, Miku is a sort of "democratized" form of pop culture: instead of a single media company tightly controlling a pop star, it's the masses who reap the benefits.
Hatsune Miku is to Japanese pop idols what Touhou is to popular traditional franchises like Gundam -- and accordingly, has grown in popularity at nearly unheard-of rates. If we're lucky, the next few decades will have more and more of this: pop culture made by consumers, for consumers, for the benefit of consumers.
Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#13It's amazing how Gibson predicted this sort of thing almost 20 years ago: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Idoru
This whole thing also gives off a a strong Philip K. Dick vibe.
Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#14This reminds me of S1m0ne (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/), in which a CG actress is developed and the producer (unlike this case) attempts to keep it a secret.
Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#15Does this mean that High Definition Video evidence of a suspect performing a crime does not constitute very strong evidence of that suspect as guilty of the crime?
Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#16It's amazing how Gibson predicted this sort of thing almost 20 years ago: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Idoru
Good call, 'Wintermute' :) Gibson's stuff seems to never feel old, a remarkable achievement for sci-fi stuff from before the internet era.
came in to mention gibson ... btw, I thought Gorillaz was halfway there to Idoru...
Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#17It's amazing how Gibson predicted this sort of thing almost 20 years ago: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Idoru
Gibson, who is after all the guy who said "the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet", might well point you to patio11's comment, and to various Media Lab-type demos from twenty years ago, and then ask: Was it not obvious that this would happen?
You've also politely failed to notice that Gibson, along with many other people, believed the hype about AI twenty years ago. ;)
Gibson's great because he notices things. For example, I will be eternally grateful for all the Joseph Cornell stuff in Count Zero because it prompted me to go see a show full of actual Joseph Cornell boxes, which are wonderful and are exactly as Gibson described them.
Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#18If all our celebrities were CG-generated illusions... what would all the tabloids print to sell magazines? Actual news? I think I'm looking forward to the future!
Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#19Like a computer-generated thing isn't part of reality.
Re: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News - She’s Not Real
#20This is only a little bit weirder on the continuum of what we already do for pop starlets, both in Japan and the United States. Japan has been manufacturing them -- that is totally the right word, too -- for about 30 years. Disney cottoned onto it a bit later. These days producers already have the key personality traits, demographic fit, sound, and marketing campaign for the new brand already planned out prior to lau…
>If Disney could produce popstars in a laboratory they would.
They basically did.