So today, I was really curious and told AI to generate as scientifically accurate a gender swap as possible.

(it was not. AI specializes in white people. I had to ask why it assumed straight hair before getting into a ted-talk hole about the second iteration below.)

But then it was a very weird experience looking at “myself.” Like ok, I think AI clearly just merged my face into a relatively close chick but it’s really really really odd going “That’s a pretty objectively beautiful lady something tells me tom holland would” and it’s less of a pretty to revel or bask in some weird chemical appreciation of and more like recognizing a family member is good looking…who doesn’t exist.

What a weird flipicock moment. I think most people have lived entire lives without a similar one.

Anyway, we live in a world where we should get a philosophical framework to how weird we can get with these devices, because this opens up a lot of weird possibilities. It ain’t me, but someone out there is #(*&ing it to a deepfake genderswap version of themselves. In some countries I think that’s already illegal, because the law is intended to protect people from deepfake, and to my read the law is just written funny. I feel like it’s a fun time where humanity is at the seat of their pants — the shadows on the wall around Plato’s cave don’t begin to scratch the surface of what we’re doing today, and I feel like trying to implement the governance on ourselves that prevents insane possibilities sanely feels like pulling ourselves out of quicksand without a rope.

Anyway, just to prove AI stretches our thinking too much, I then entered a seperate chat with the same AI tech, and told it “I’m curious, gender swap this image and keep it as medically accurate as possible.

And it’s funny. I think people are losing a sense of how many liberties AI takes with it’s confident output. Because it’s like putting a book through a language translator, and then translating it back to English. You kinda have something…but it’s now something else.