True or False: Mia's blog

One thing that stood out to me this week was discussing Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Tuesday and talking about how con men get portrayed in film and media in general. It's interesting because the movie clearly wants you to root for Lawrence and Freddy even though they spend the entire runtime lying to people and taking their money. The writing does a lot of work to make that feel okay: the marks are usually wealthy, a little oblivious, or somehow deserving of getting fooled, and the cons themselves are framed as clever rather than cruel. It made me think about how differently we'd probably react if the same tactics were used on someone sympathetic instead of someone rich and gullible. The movie is really just using the same psychological tricks we've been discussing all along, authority, charm, confidence, but it dresses them up as entertainment instead of manipulation. That distinction between a "con man" and a "scammer" in pop culture seems to come down ...

One thing that stood out to me from our discussions about deepfakes and phishing this last week is how much deception has changed with technology, while the psychology behind it has stayed surprisingly similar. Before this class, I mostly thought of deepfakes as the funny things I would see on social media, like cats dancing or celebrities doing things they obviously never did. Most of those are easy to recognize as fake, but I have also seen some that are surprisingly close to reality. Our discussion in class made me think more about how many different ways deepfakes could actually be used beyond social media. Even though the major AI chatbots have started putting more restrictions around what they will generate, there are always new AI tools being created that make it possible to get around those limitations.  Also on the topic of phishing, I got an SMS about a FedEx delivery over the weekend, which was especially funny because I had actually ordered something from Amazon around ...

 One thing I was excited about when looking at the syllabus for this class was the number of films we would be watching and discussing. A personal goal of mine is to work through a list of 50 classic movies. I feel like there is a simplicity to older movies, even when they are exploring complex themes. I had never heard of "Paper Moon" before this class, so I went into it knowing absolutely nothing. It has now become one of my favorites. Although we have not yet gotten deeply into discussing the film, learning some of the basic facts surrounding it already led me down an interesting rabbit hole. We were asked to think about the title of the movie. While there is an obvious visual reference to the paper moon during the photograph scene, I wondered whether “paper moon” was also a common saying that I was missing. Being from Mexico, I occasionally miss the meaning behind common English expressions. So after looking into it, I found that the film was originally based on a book w...