The winner takes it all in AI’s new world order

Whether it’s photos of Kate Middleton or ABBA’s astonishing ‘live’ show, it’s getting harder to believe what’s in front of our eyes as technology advances

In every kidnapping movie ever, when the kidnappers need to prove their hostage is still alive, they take a photo of the hostage holding that day’s newspaper. On the internet, when somebody wishes to prove a princess is actually a hostage — or dead — they examine photos of the princess, attempting to find the equivalent of a misdated newspaper. In a video of Kate Middleton visiting Windsor Farm Shop, supposedly shot last Saturday by a member of the public, there appeared to be anachronistic Christmas decorations in the background. It was “disturbing that newspapers like The Times are reporting this as fact”, tweeted a senior BBC (sports) broadcaster, Sonja McLaughlan.

The Daily Telegraph dispatched its crack investigative unit; the decorations were there, they found. That wasn’t in itself proof the footage was authentic, of course. The Kate in the footage could have been a body double, as many argued, among them the senior legal correspondent for ABC News, Sunny Hostin.

So what? Is this another article about the idiocy of conspiracy theorists? Not quite. In an interview with the Guardian, Daniel Jolley, a social psychologist at Nottingham University, nailed it. These endless conspiracy theories about Kate were so potent “because they are also entertaining”.

“It feels like you’re in a movie, with you as the investigator... That’s kind of exciting,” he said.

As I write this, Kensington Palace has just released the video of Kate revealing she has cancer. That may take the entertainment out of it for most people, for now, but dignified restraint is not the default setting of social media.

Fake news is entertainment. And fake entertainment is news. We recently took the kids to London to see fake footage and body doubles of a different royal family. ABBA Voyage, running at the purpose-built ABBA Arena, is a concert performed by digital avatars of the band (though priced as if they’re really there).

ABBA split up in 1982. In 2016, they began exploring the potential of reuniting for a virtual-reality concert experience. They went back into the studio to record two new songs and ended up recording an entire album. They recruited the legendary specialeffects company, Industrial Light & Magic, and spent five weeks in motion-capture suits in front of 160 cameras, recording a 90-minute set.

This was watched by a ballet choreographer and four body doubles, who in turn went before the cameras in the motion-capture suits, recreating and elaborating on the veterans’ dance moves. The resulting footage was then worked on by 140 animators. Meanwhile, a steel-and-timber stadium with a 65-million pixel screen was designed and erected in London.

This is all reported to have cost $175m (€161m), making it one of the most expensive live music experiences in history. The show plays to 3,000 people seven times a week, giving it an annual audience of over one million and an annual box office of over $100m.

The result is certainly entertaining, though I spent as much of the concert staring like a conspiracy theorist, trying to spot the flaws. The first surprise was that the band that walked on stage were not, in any perceptible sense, “holograms”. They were lifesize and appeared three-dimensional. There was little to suggest they were digital images rather than real people, except a shimmering, ethereal quality to them — and the fact they looked unnaturally young. They look, in fact, just like they did 50 years ago.

There was a 10-piece live band downstage and astonishing large screens displaying dizzying camerawork and effects, and sublime lights. It looked and felt just like a hightech pop concert — the slickest, most sumptuous concert I have ever been at — except the youthful and beautiful band who were playing are actually now in their 70s.

One of the new ABBA songs is I Still Have Faith in You, a nostalgic, slightly melancholic story of lives well lived and wisdom hard-earned.

“I still have faith in you/I see it now,” sings Anni-Frid Lyngstad. “Through all these years that faith lives on/Somehow.” It’s a good song. It’s recognisably ABBA.

For a band that contains two of the most famous divorced couples in pop history and has been on a 50-year hiatus, it’s a redemptive sentiment. Yet there’s something perverse about this song of authentic life experience being performed by inauthentic youth.

“I know I hear a bittersweet song/ In the memories we share,” Anni-Frid sings. “Bittersweet” is what we call the remembering of good times to which we cannot return. The ABBA Voyage project suggests something else — a denial of ageing, rather than an appreciation of its inevitability.

“Copies of ourselves, avatars, will go on living after we are dead,” Bjorn Ulvaeus has said. “And that’s the way of the future.”

Next for the avatar treatment are the American rock band Kiss. This will allow their legacy to continue for “eternity”, said Per Sundin, head of Pophouse Entertainment, producer of both shows.

As the technology improves and costs come down, will avatars crowd out live performance? Instead of going to shows played live by performers who are fallible and ageing — in true, bittersweet fashion — will we prefer perfect performances by unageing avatars, long after the original artists are dead? The next horizon in this technology is regeneration of already dead performers.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell envisaged a dystopian future where, on the orders of the Party, historical records are destroyed or falsified and history is constantly being rewritten. The result? “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” In the ABBA version, nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always on.

The problem is not the fake photos and film — be they Kate photoshopping her children or political campaigns using AI-generated images to undermine opponents or ABBA recreating their youthful selves. The problem is the collapse in the believability of any photos — and, with that, the collapse of the expectation that photos, or film, depict something real. At that point, photography becomes just another medium of fiction.

It all makes for great entertainment. But that entertainment is crowding out two things that have been mainstays of our culture for millennia: news, and live art. What happens when we can no longer believe in either of them? And what happens when we no longer care?

The next horizon is regeneration of dead performers