Showing results by author "Michael Grothaus" in All Categories

It’s our world, but decades into the future...an ordinary world, where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in burger shops. All conflicts are safely oceans away. People get up, work, and have dinner. Everything is as it should be. Except for 17-year-old John, a tech prodigy from a damaged family, who hides a deeply personal secret. But everything starts to change when he enters a tiny café on a cold Tokyo night. A café run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia.

Deepfake technology can create video evidence of just about anything: Hollywood superstar Margot Robbie in an orgy, Chinese president Xi Jinping declaring nuclear war, basketball legend Michael Jordan winning the World Cup. The only limit is the imagination. In a time where fake news and disinformation is becoming harder and harder to identify, it is more essential than ever to understand the dark origins of deepfakes. Journalist Michael Grothaus goes down the rabbit hole as he interviews the often morally dubious, yet incredibly skilled creators of this content.

Jerry has a traumatic past that leaves him subject to psychotic hallucinations and depressive episodes. When he stands accused of stealing a priceless Van Gogh painting, he goes underground, where he develops an unwilling relationship with a woman who believes that the voices she hears are from God.

Debut novelist Michael Grothaus visits the Audible Studios. After earning a degree in filmmaking from Columbia, working as a film journalist and for companies such as Twentieth Century Fox and Apple, Michael moved to the UK and got a postgraduate degree in creative writing. He talks about his debut novel, Epiphany Jones, a crime thriller about sex trafficking among the Hollywood elite.

Journalist and author Michael Grothaus has spent years researching and writing about the dark side of the internet, from online trolls and pornography to sex-trafficking. This is his quest to pull back the curtain on deep fake pornography. Who's making it? Who's affected by it? Who's trying to stop it? And what happens next?