#105: AI Storytelling
Quite strange and creepy
Hello.
You are reading Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. I am a research fellow at HAW Hamburg currently in the midst of finally finishing a 60 page dossier on TikTok for the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung / Federal Agency for Civic Education. Here is your TikTok update:
💾 AI Storytelling
👴 My generation
🇮🇷 GRWM to get killed
🗞️TikTok in (African) newsrooms
💾 AI Storytelling
Back in May Rolling Stone reported on TikTok accounts that were posting “horrifying artificial intelligence-generated clips of murder victims — mostly children — describing their own ghastly demise.” They’re quite strange and creepy, said Paul Bleakley, assistant professor in criminal justice at the University of New Haven. And indeed these productions have a weird, creepy feel like many of the 2023 media productions making use of AI tools that seem to make progress day by day somewhere deep in the midst of the uncanny valley.
Andre Deck wrote about alternate history videos on TikTok for Rest of the World and accounts like @what.if_ai that – according to Nayana Prakash, a PhD candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute – fill a gap in the imagination. German journalist Kevin Schramm tried out to produce AI storytelling videos on TikTok like this one. Inspired by german accounts like EchtUnglaublich or Fesselnde Geschichten with views up to 5M and over 400K followers he used 5 easy steps to come up with decent results: 1) Generate an image with Midjourney 2) Steal a short story from the internet 3) Use a tool like D-ID to turn the image into a talking image 4) Generate captions with a tool like Captions.ai 5) Upload video to TikTok and add spooky sounds.
Sophia Smith Galer who has just been back from this years VidCon posted this as one of her key take-aways: creators will be using and defining AI-powered content light years ahead of mainstream media orgs. And she is right. Especially when all new features are explored and tried out instantly on a daily basis in a world where Midjourney´s astonishing Zoom out effect from June 26 is already old news. Nonetheless check out this strangely familiar example from the Ghibliverse.
Have you seen great usages of AI powered storytelling on TikTok? Happy to learn more…
👴 Stop my generation
Inside 'millennial humor,' the new outdated trait Gen Z has identified (Insider). This article brought be back to the entire discussion if generation labels mean anything. If you ask sociology professor Philip N. Cohen from the University of Maryland the answer is NO. In 2021 he “and about 150 other demographers and social scientists have taken in an open letter to the Pew Research Center, urging them to stop promoting the use of generation labels (the Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, millennials and now Generation Z)” (Washington Post). Two years on and we are still using the labels although the New Yorker asked us to stop doing it: It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations” (New Yorker). Thanks Douglas Coupland.
🇮🇷 GRWM to get killed
On top of my reading list this week: Picture Protests for Freedom in Iran. The Memefication of Resistance on Social Media by Kerstin Schankweiler & Verena Straub in journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual in german (PDF / HTML) including observations on #GetReadyWithMe to get killed in Iran: Politicizing TikTok memes and makeup tutorials from an art and visual history perspective.
📈Code 5: Stimulation
“TikTok really excels at creating assets to help brands and creators understand how to use the platform. Would be great to see this from all the players” tweets Lia Haberman. I’m not sure I agree with this observation and would like to object politely. The “attention triggers” suggested by TikTok are pretty banal as they encapsulate everything from music (“fast paced music boosts your neuro activity”) to movement (“movement catches the users eye”) and the suggested video structure suggests a hook at the beginning, music, and a bunch of scene changes showing “the product”. To me that sounds like this cooking advice: There are ingredients that you can eat, mix them and do not forget constant stirring. The chart simply simulates information but it has an ice cream cone floating above.
🗞️TikTok in (African) newsrooms
The Journalism and Media Lab (JAMLAB) is an innovation lab and incubator supporting innovation in African journalism and media. In collaboration with DeutscheWelle Jamlab will be hosting a webinar discussing the introduction of TikTok in newsrooms. I recommend it because all colleagues involved are great. I sat on a panel with Flourish (she helped set up DW’s Lagos TikTok channel now rebranded as the 77 percent) and together with Zenzele and Stephanie i conducted Zimbabwe’s first TikTok journalism workshop. So i might be a bit biased here. Date: 12 July. Register here: http://rb.gy/zjod7
🔦 More
#Well TikTok has said under oath that Americans’ data has always been stored outside China. Now it’s saying there are big exceptions for creators—who it claims it treats differently than “typical users.” (Forbes)
#Ethiopia The platforms that invite us to share our lives online are failing to mediate the complexities of the world they seek to engage with (Coda Story)
#TikTok The COO has quit (The Verge)
#Marketing Adobe made a pretty good TikTok (Twitter)
#BookTok: TikTok Partners With Candle Media & Supports Reese Witherspoon’s Search For “Underrepresented Storytellers” (Deadline)
#USA Despite threats of a ban, most U.S. users aren’t changing their TikTok habits (Modern Retail)
#Fake TikTok Podcasts. We’ll unpack the amusing, if confusing, social trend and give you some tips on how to tell if what you’re listening to is even real. (Stay Tuned)
#Midsommer is a thing now – again and again and again and again... to cite a famous midsommar band (BBC)
#Mozilla is asking you to donate money in order to “build a new, open source mobile app that will let TikTok users contribute their data so that experts can study how TikTok's algorithm works with an open-source TikTok Reporter app.” (Mozilla)
Anything you would like me to cover? Any questions? Happy to discuss in the comments. And if you dare please recommend this newsletter to a person you know. Thanks so much! Speak soon. Ciao, Marcus.
Danke -Sehr informativ! Bin auf die Publikation bei bpb gespannt.