In Your Face, Not My Face
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Maybe it’s a generational difference. Perhaps it’s the way that technology is evolving. Identity theft. Deepfakes. AI image harvesting. But I’m just not with sharing personal photos on the internet.
Something For Something (aliquid per aliquid)
Back in the day, when Facebook was new and innovative, and not yet creepy and invasive, it was fun to share photos from your weekend trips, and group get-togethers.
And who could forget Google Photos and their famous “back up all your photos for free, no limits” offer. We all bought into that, right? Back in the day when the internet was simpler, and before we were more aware that:
If you do not pay for the product, you are the product.
Not many people asked about why Google was so nice to offer free unlimited hosting. The truth, of course, is they were quietly training their AI on our photos. Same as Facebook, and other companies. And, predictably enough, guess what happened once they had enough content to present their AI tools and model?
No more free storage. That’s right - we traded our visual memories and information for a limited free service.
Now the process repeats itself - we get free access to their (limited) chat bots, AI models. And in return? Well, they train on our queries, our questions, our searches. Most don’t even care, that is, if they stop to think about it.
Deepfakes: A False Copy of the Real (aliquid falsum ex aliquo vero)
Now deepfaking is a whole other beast. The AI tech is mature enough that a photo can be taken from one context and altered to be something completely different. This is a real challenge to the time-honored arguments of “Seeing is believing”. For the longest time, if we saw proof (photo, video, etc) then it was believed to be true. Now that photo or video that is “evidence” could be completely false, invented.
The Chinese appear to have Deepfaked Hollywood. So now it seems that seeing is not believing. A picture is no longer worth 1,000 words (what are words even worth nowadays?). What, if anything, can be believed?
Well, I’m planting my really tiny flag of resistance. Yes, I have a few photos of myself that I use as avatars here and there. I can stick with those. But lately I’ve replaced photos of myself with emojis. Yes, thank you Apple - I was able o make an emoji of myself, and as luck would have it, the emoji really looks like me. A lot. Enough so that anyone who knows me in real life would see it and know that is me.
The internet does not need my family photos. Those who want to relive the memories have the photos. Complete strangers don’t need them. To the point, it baffles me why there is such an addiction to Facebook, Instagram, etc. Don’t need to scroll and see photos of you and happy family, kids, ice cream, and pets. It doesn’t show me who you are and what you are living now. It only shows what you want the world to see.
Just because there are over 8 billion people on the planet doesn’t mean that I need a 2 centimeter deep connection to each of them.
So, that’s what I have to say about that. Maybe you don’t agree - no worries. You do yours, I’ll keep on doing mine. Until next time!
