Fanlore's Journal

♥ mixed language

I was watching a Chinese vlogger open some mail and she was like, "If you can guess what's in this, leave a comment," and I immediately thought, "yi ben livre." Which is a combination of French and Chinese that I blame on Language Jones because youtube had just shown me a thumbnail of his video "Stop Mixing Languages." (And he speaks French, which I assume was the connection my brain made, since when I started learning Chinese it was ASL that I kept substituting with, probably because it was my most recent non-native working language.)

♥ language in dreams

The other funny thing about that is that it's a reminder of how differently we think, since I know a lot of people don't think in words and I definitely do. The other day I saw a discussion of dreaming in non-native languages, and several advanced language learners seemed convinced this phenomenon is either imaginary or "bogus" (not sure exactly what they meant by that), despite multilingual people assuring them it's real and normal. I remember my glee the first time I woke up and realized I'd been dreaming in Chinese. But I know a lot of people don't remember their dreams, either, so it must just be different brains with different experiences.

♥ AI face editing

Relatedly, I hadn't noticed any AI face editing until tonight, when I was watching my one of my favorite Taiwanese vloggers and suddenly thought, "wait, that's not a real face shape." (China has a relatively extreme "beauty filter" culture, and constant exposure to it may make people more likely to slide across the line from "very idealized" to "straight up anime" face without realizing it.) I googled AI face editing, and now I can't stop noticing people's teeth. I hope that passes quickly.

♥ AI face editing and faceblindness

Oh, but also, I found a helpful English video about a Chinese demonstration of AI face editing (the comments were definitely from non-Chinese viewers), and it included a demonstration of live AI face-swapping at the end. I'm faceblind, which I didn't think about at all until the face-swapping demonstration, because the face-editing was very clear to me. I could easily see the difference between the edited and unedited faces. But I could not see the difference between an original face and a face swap. It was amazing: the narrator would be like, "here's a Tom Cruise face swap" and I was like, "it's the same guy," and then the narrator would be like, "and here, obviously it's Scarlett Johannsen" and I was like, "what obviously; what are you talking about, it's obviously the same person."

So anyway, I don't know what that means, except that there's something different about AI face editing that's visible to me as a faceblind person in a way face-swapping isn't. (By comparison, I mean, I've never recognized editing without a comparison until tonight, and this wasn't "that face looks edited" or even "that face doesn't look real," but literally "that's not a normal human face shape." It looked perfectly real, it just wasn't biologically possible.)

♥ training with the pup

Finally, Daphne and I met with a dog trainer today, and as I told Marci, "I was impressed by him." She was like, "That's not a reaction you usually have to men." I know. So rare. (I often get along better with old men, and he says he's been training for 50 years, so maybe the pattern holds.) On the strength of our first meeting I agreed to a few "private" classes rather than a group class. No money was exchanged until the end of today's session, so I don't want to gush until we meet again, but he did everything right in the initial evaluation.