On AI Slop, Depersonalization, and Hyper-Personalization

Or maybe things can just be fun if you follow the good in your heart

Neither of these pictures is me, but both are what happened after I tried to get ChatGPT to create a professional headshot for me. I don’t have a particular need for a professional headshot, I just wanted to see what would happen. Lo and behold these uncanny valley versions of my actual face. This is as close as I think I’ll ever come to being able to see myself the same way a stranger sees me. And it’s kind of fun!

Firstly, all I need to do now is insert one of these gentlemen into my mental model of some action and I feel like I can judge it far more objectively. It feels like I’ve transcended my own ego. It’s no longer me imagining myself, it’s me imagining some other person as an uninvolved third party. It’s like a whole new world of perspective opened up on my whole life.

Secondly, I’ve also begun to see them as the angel and demon on my shoulders. The guy on the left, Hal Halvorsen? Sweetheart! Pillar of his community! Never without his wallet, a comb, a pocket knife, and a handkerchief. He’s a scoutmaster, a mentor, a master carpenter, and he runs the soup kitchen at his local church. The guy on the right, though? Glenn Habek? Wow. Enormous piece of shit. He’s totally checked out and he’s lying to everybody about it as if they’ can’t tell. He lets people down constantly. All he does it hurt the people who try to love him because loving him is the single most unimaginable sin in his world. He lives the small life of a coward who thinks if you’re just hurting yourself it’s nobody’s business but your own.

This in turn made me realize I’m quite possibly internally prejudice against my mixed Slavic/Irish/Norwegian ancestry.

We All Love the Ghibli Art Don’t We?

There are a lot of weirdos on the internet and it makes me reluctant to share photos of my children. However, becoming a parent also gives you the vampiric need to show people pictures of your children. It’s an impossible conundrum! Enter studio Ghibli, ChatGPT, and again, that notion of critical distance.

None of these are pictures of my children and none of these are close enough to being pictures of my children so as to trigger my uncanny valley response. They don’t make me feel like I’m making my children vulnerable to anything or anyone. Yet they’re also close enough to the vibe of my children that it still makes me proud to share them! Look at my son rubbing mud on his face while I’m telling him to stop but where I’m also stopping to take a picture of him! Look at the whole family together while the little one is happy and the big one is being glum because he hates pictures! That’s me and my boy at the zoo with a pinecone!

This makes me happy because I want to share all of these things and now it’s like I can place an appropriateness filter in front of everything to defend against the evils of the internet.

So, in this case, we hit some magical valley where we are the exact right distance away from too close and too far away.

What about Music?

One of the biggest laughs of my childhood comes from the movie Baseketball when the main character is driving in his car and the radio starts playing a song about his exact circumstances. It doesn’t hold up quite the same now because I can instantly create any song on any them that I want so the premise is stale.

If I’m feeling a particular kind of way, I can instantly spin up a high energy country music about it! For the record I usually prompt with the “banger” chorus lines already in mind, tweak the language a bit to what sounds best to my ear, but the actual musical composition is all AI!

Darlin’… Don’t Believe in Me So Much, created in response to my wife trying to get me to fix our heat pump, our hybrid car battery, and several other objects that usually require expert skill in a very short span of time. This is me letting her know that I don’t have the skills to do that.

Budget Time a Comin’ created in response to well, me having to go secure funding for my product roadmap.

Got me a Computer Job, created in response to my thinking about how I used to work physically demanding jobs and now I just attend conference calls and answer emails.

Cake Eating Product Guy, created in response to my general feeling of inferiority that I just tell people to code things without ever coding anything myself. Except I wanted it to be a Dolly Parton song.

The Voice of Freedom, created in response to what I imagine is the living hell of being “that one topic guy” where you are a public figure but only for a single topic. In this case, Greg Lukianoff and free speech.

Chasing Politeness, created in response to me bugging Chris Best on Notes and him doing that thing where he responds with professional Canadian CEO Politeness.

I like these as recurring jokes more than actual songs, but the music is actually really good to my untrained ear! I still do this occasionally as a sort of in-family meme. And while I might go on long rants about how funny it would be if there was a whole genre of country music about working in a software development environment, I wouldn’t dedicate the time to create any of it without AI tools.

What if I was a Better Artist?

I used to draw constantly but it is one of those things that went away as I got older. After a while, you just don’t have the hours to spend on the hobby anymore. For a while there in high school, though, all I did was draw monsters and heroes. Giant fantasy settings. So what if I just took something like one of my old sketches, put it in ChatGPT, and said “Make this better.” Well, you get something like the result above. I am terrified of an octopus that has a bunch of eyes. I am also afraid of spider centaurs. The only thing that can possibly save us is a robot with a black-hole energy mace and a guy with a golden helmet that has three points.

Is this what I imagined in my head? No. But I’m enough of an artist to know that even when I make something completely by myself that it doesn’t come out exactly as it was in my head. That golden helmet is off, the face on the spider centaurs is off, and the eyes on the octopus demon aren’t distributed the way I wanted.

But for something I could do in five minutes? I think that’s a pretty good result. One day when I have more time I might try to uplift all of my old drawings, which are currently sitting in a photo album on my iPhone.

A few more below the paywall.