An Idiot's Guide To Not Being Trolled
Plus: paragliding into the Death Zone.
Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing - a romp through the sciences in search of a good wow.
This thing works in seasons, and the one we’re currently in is looking at the sciences of the atmosphere, which we’ll be returning to properly in the next edition.
But if you remember the recent story of early aeronauts Coxwell and Glaisher and their uncontrollable balloon ascent into the ‘Death Zone’ - here’s a modern equivalent from last week that’s just as blood-curdling…if it can be believed.
These are the Qilian mountains of China, on the border between the Qinghai and Gansu provinces in the north of the country.
Last week, Chinese paraglider Peng Yujiang posted video footage onto Douyin, the Chinese short-form video service that internationally became TikTok. It appeared to show him being caught in a “cloud suck”, an unusually powerful thermal of warm air rushing upwards, which quickly took him from around 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) all the way into the frigid and barely breathable height of 8.500 metres (27,800 feet), only slightly below the height of Everest.
As he told Chinese Media Group:
"It was terrifying... Everything was white. I couldn't see any direction. Without the compass, I wouldn't have known which way I was going. I thought I was flying straight, but in reality, I was spinning."
This is a still from the video he uploaded, via the BBC:
It’s an incredible story, and it’s astonishing he survived to tell the tale, and who wouldn’t want to believe it?
But then someone noticed some of the footage looked rather improbable, including camera angles that even the cinematographers working on Severance would struggle to pull off…
And then someone noticed a logo had been cropped out of later versions of the footage - the watermark of Doubao, an AI tool from the same company that owns Douyin & TikTok.
As per NBC:
“GetReal Labs, an AI-verification company founded by Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and authority on image and video manipulation, told NBC News Friday that the company believed the first five seconds of the video were compiled using AI.
“We were able to extract a few frames and analyze them using our Inspect platform, and our models confirm that the images are synthetic,” GetReal Labs said, noting several other elements in the video differed from the rest of the footage.”
All the international news outlets covering this story have now taken down all of that video footage, while they investigate its authenticity.
Maybe this will turn out to be yet another disheartening cautionary tale about the influence of AI fakery in the mad scramble to go viral on social media. Or maybe Peng’s flight was entirely real, and he’s exactly as lucky as he claims he is (the suspect footage only appears in the first 5 seconds of the video, and now-deleted tracking data seems to back up his story), so instead, it’s an example of what a total pig’s ear an AI “enhancement” can make of your believability if you’re daft enough to fail to disclose using it.
But it certainly seems the Chinese authorities believe him:
“[Peng’s friend] Gu Zhimin posted a flight video without permission, which had a bad impact,” the report said. “He [meaning Peng] was grounded for six months and asked to write a report to deeply reflect on the negative impact of his behaviour.”
Yet there’s no question all this could have happened. Here’s why:
In 2007, Polish paraglider Ewa Wiśnierska was dragged upwards within a cumulonimbus storm all the way to a height of 9,947 metres (over 32,600 feet), passed out through lack of oxygen and then floated unconscious for up to an hour (BIG YIKES) until she encountered air that triggered her descent.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Wiśnierska says experience told her she had no chance of survival, but a doctor told her that blacking out had saved her.
"It was because that I got unconscious because then the heart slows down all the functions - it saved my life," she told ABC radio.”
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So! Today, we’re talking about trolling - and we begin with the horror of my teenage years.