spirits having flown
Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, also makes Unreal Engine, a widely used 3-D rendering platform that can be used to create interactive, photorealistic environments. This week it announced a new feature for the engine, the ability to create "high-fidelity digital humans in minutes" with what it calls the MetaHuman creator. According to the marketing copy, it will "empower anyone to create a bespoke photorealistic digital human ... You can directly manipulate facial features, adjust skin complexion, and select from preset body types, hairstyles, clothing, and more. You can even edit your character’s teeth!"
This tool, Epic claims, will make the process of making "quality" simulated humans "faster and more scalable," so that a variety of screen spaces (games, architectural renderings, film sequences, live broadcasts, etc.) can be rapidly filled or augmented with highly plausible but ultimately disposable people. These are meant not just to be digital extras but "virtual participants in immersive training scenarios you can’t tell from the real thing."
The Weird Science overtones of this are evident. VentureBeat reports that "artists will be able to fine-tune features such as skin tone, eye color, facial features, hairstyles, and textures, down to really subtle details like peach fuzz and fine wrinkles," just like the teen nerds in the 1985 movie fine-tuned their fantasy girlfriend. Obviously, it is a pretty impoverished conception of humans to think of them as made up of a finite number of surface attributes that can be laid out in an array of binaries adjustable with slider controls, as if the "meaning" of these traits were simply a matter of quantity ("eyes more blue"). Even the movie ends with a critique of that attitude, though that was more of a retroactive alibi for allowing audiences to indulge the fantasy.
The MetaHuman creator doesn't seem to bother with a fig-leaf critique. It is presented as a quasi-democratization of the ability to generate "real-time digital humans" to order, which is presented as entirely ordinary desire — a routine wish for control over how things look and feel in your customizable spaces. It implies not only that one treat the human form as primarily a manipulatable object but also that one become practiced in refining one's attitudes about which qualities should be regarded as more or less "human." Engagement with such engines would encourage thinking of other real people — and oneself — in the same terms, as subject to external fine-tuning that is entirely separable from any internal consciousness. One's humanity would be a matter of having the sliders set to the right levels.
It may seem as though simulated humans could be placed in situations in which it would be unthinkable to place actual humans, but this would only make such an eventuality demonstrably more thinkable — a fully realized rendering. In foregrounding the "realism" of the simulations, Epic (if you take its marketing language at face value) suggests that the main purpose of representing humans is to allow us to see unreal beings as real. This would be to habituate us to doubting the interiority of the others we encounter, a feeling that would be presumably reinforced by our own firsthand experience with generating "bespoke" humans (if not our own avatars). We are supposed to get used to interacting with others whose humanity can be perceived as ambiguous — as simulated or partial. This would provide a meta-training in indifference to others and to having to bother with trying to imagine their interiority. It could further accustom one to withholding the attribution of full humanity to anyone, as one sees fit.
Ideally, the quality of one's humanity would not be "measured" in representational or visual terms at all; "humanity" would not be treated as a matter of a particular appearance. The MetaHuman creator seems directed at blurring the lines between people and representations, and the ethical attitudes one adopts accordingly.
The aspiration to a more realistic simulation is also at once an effort to make more real a kind of derealization of others. It reminded me of the recent documentary A Glitch in the Matrix, which profiles a few people who apparently suffer from depersonalization-derealization disorder. That is, they believe that they are living in a simulation and much of the phenomena they experience is computer-generated, including other people. By their own accounts, they seem to have stumbled onto an ill-conceived form of metaphysics at a very young age but did not develop the means to work through it. They speak of the reality of other people's points of view as though they are a problem rather than the solution to the problem.
Perhaps to illustrate this solipsism, the film represents its interview subjects as digital avatars situated in real-world physical spaces, much like the lawyer who was a cat in that Zoom call. One appears as a sort of a bronze leonine centurion, another appears as a brain in a jar, and so on. It wasn't clear to me if this was self-deprecating humor on their part or an expression of some nihilistic stance toward consensus reality as opposed to the game engines in our minds. I wasn't sure to what degree they got to choose them, how much fine-tuning they were allowed. When one can fully customize one's appearance, everything signifies, which makes any interpretation of what is meant by a certain self-presentation seem incomplete. Part of consensus reality is an agreement on the limits to such interpretation, to only reading so much into another's appearance before accepting some portion of it as out of their control. This leaves room for the more dynamic expression of their presence through their behavior, their speech, their thinking. Consensus reality means you can say "I'm not a cat," and everyone can still accept it and move on.