The murder of George Floyd pointed out one stark fact. If not for the camera, or in most of these cases, cellphone video, it would be difficult if not impossible, to believe that another person could be so devoid of humanity.
And if not for the phone footage taken by now-convicted murderer William Bryan, there wouldn’t have been an arrest of him, Travis, and Gregory McMichael. Travis shot and killed Ahmaud Arbury on February 23, 2020. But the McMichaels and Bryan weren’t arrested on state charges of felony murder until May after Bryan’s video was “leaked.”
So when Evanier posts a brief list of some of the folks convicted of murder but then exonerated, it makes one pause.
This reminded me of some passing comment a blogger buddy made. “If there’s no picture, it didn’t happen.” I don’t believe that, but clearly, many do. Certainly, in these cases, and many others, you have to go to the videotape, as it were. Also, I often muse on how what we see informs in a manner different from what we read.
There was one moment in the McMichaels/Bryan trial that, if I had read about it in the paper, I would have assumed it must have been mistranscribed. Laura Hogue, Greg McMichael’s attorney, blamed the victim. “Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made, does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”
Is it real?
“His long, dirty toenails.” My wife and I always watch the news after it is recorded on the DVR. I stopped the broadcast and had to play it again. This seemed to want to portray Ahmaud as “less than”, a common tactic and one, I suspect, did not go well with the mostly-white jury.
Googling for this piece, I came across an article from 2019. This Website Generates AI Portraits of People Who Don’t Exist. “NVIDIA got the world talking in December 2018 after showing off a new AI that can create ultra-realistic photos of people who don’t actually exist. Now there’s a website that lets you generate these imaginary portraits yourself. It’s called thispersondoesnotexist.com” In fact, I purloined the picture on this page from the site.
It would be easy to go down a wormhole about deepfakes and how it is getting harder to spot. Maybe some other time.