Computer Vision News 12 Computer Vision Book What is your new book, A History of Fake Things on the Internet, about? It’s a really fun history that goes back to the Internet’s early days about all of these fictions we see on the Internet. What I think is most interesting about this book is that it’s not the standard technology ethics tale about all this fake stuff is bad. We need to get it off the Internet. We can’t have anything that is fictional on the Internet. This is really a story of human creativity. Why do people like telling stories, especially on the Internet? What’s the deal with all that creative software that it feels like computer vision has been developing over the years? Now, it’s mainstream, people are using it. Why do they use it in the ways they do? How do we understand that media landscape? How were you able to find things that others missed before you? I was able to have a different perspective on this. Number one, I have a background in computer hacking [he laughs]. I knew about underground communities that were using the Internet at an early period. I knew of some interesting people to talk to who were there at the very beginning. They led me to interesting files that were still in the Internet Archive. They led me to other people that I did not know that had interesting things to tell me. I was able to become a historian, based on that background, fairly easily compared to a mainstream academic or journalist. Author Walter Scheirer is the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and a dear friend of Computer Vision News. His new book introduces readers to a creative side of computer vision that users love but one which has, he says, undeservedly received a bad reputation in the tech press. Walter is here to tell us more and set the record straight A History of Fake Things on the Internet
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