AI Ghosts Distort Human Faces
It’s a curse. Can we beat the ghost or do we have to join it?
When cameras first appeared in the 19th century, many people didn’t trust photographs. Did they steal your soul? Was the image “real”?
You can see a few early photographic images in Kieran Zhane’s story, Evolution of the Camera. Ghostly possibilities are made evident in Spirit Photography and the Occult: Making the Invisible Visible by the Media of Mediumship for the UK’s National Science and Media Museum.
In ghost stories, a photo can reflect a supernatural state that isn’t otherwise obvious—like a curse.
For example, in the film The Ring (2002), photos are developed.
In some of them, the faces are distorted. This is meant to suggest that the teenagers were already cursed when the photo was taken.
A similar idea is in One Missed Call: Final (2006), when digital photography felt new. A computer mouse swipes over the photo, blurring the faces. The distortion is inherently upsetting. We just don’t want this done to our faces.
In stories that involve a curse, often the idea is to remove the curse so you can go back to living your life the way it was before. But maybe the way to beat the curse is to go forward instead: to use the curse as an opportunity to learn and grow and to come out the other side.
Today, I note Enrique Dans’s story It took a while, but finally Getty Images has learned from disruption (English) / Aprendiendo de la disrupción: el caso de Getty Images (Spanish).
He gives an example of an image published a year ago in The Verge’s article “Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content.” This image is Stable Diffusion’s generative AI image of a crowd with an imitation of the Getty Images watermark. A snippet of the image:
All the faces are scary. Context does it; the photo as a whole cannot represent reality. A plausible human face becomes frightening when chumming alongside an implausible face. The implausibility effect spreads like fungus; the whole crowd is suspect. If this were a ghost story, all of these people would be doomed.
My question is how we get uncursed. It’s everyone’s question now. No one knows the answer.
Must we wind the technological clock backward? Kill the AI and stop people from using it? (This isn’t happening.)
Must we go forward? Improve the technology to make it better at drawing faces? (This is happening, and quickly.)
Is there some other way to run through this scene—not the scene of a single photo, I mean, but this major encounter of our moment? Maybe we ought to shrewdly confront the AI, face-to-face, as it were—our real face meeting our falsely generated face—with the end goal of escaping tech’s clutches. (I’m not sure if this is happening, and how we’d know if we were succeeding at it.)
Dans points out that Getty Images is choosing to “join the disrupters.” He suggests one takeaway, which is that, when you meet up with disrupting tech that wants to distort your face, “utilízala”: use the tech for your own profit. Get your own ghosts and train them to fight before other people’s ghosts get you, as I’d name that approach.
There are choices to be made about ethics and pragmatism, about earning a living and surviving, about artistic creativity and business innovation, about drawing a picture or taking a photo that doesn’t suck.
I think we’re trying to see our own face. It’s inherently impossible, isn’t it. Our eyes are in our face. We can’t see our own face unless we have a mirror, a camera, a generative AI. At a certain point, the “face” we see is no longer ours. Or is it? If it’s a product we own, it’s a thing that is “ours.” But that’s not what we are.
To be a human is to be. To have tools is another matter. We can have tools, and having them helps us survive, but the having is not what being human is.
Can a technology curse us? Maybe. When you develop the photo and see what you look like, it’s usually too late.
Tucker Lieberman has a couple short stories in Instant Classic (That No One Will Read). As humans have explained this anthology, Instant Classic offers nine sardonic tales holding a carnival mirror to writers and stories. From a deal with the Devil to the ultimate AI vs human showdown, witness the terrifying spectacle of artists who’ll do anything to clamber out of the creative trenches alive.