Manipulation, Distortion, FOMO, & Nostalgia: Is the use of people as a subject to AI morally right?
By: Hydra đ
In response to Gem Fletcher's, "Maria Mavropoulou â How the artist used AI to rewrite her own family history:"
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly taking over the worldâ and no I am not referring to the humankind-killing AI robot in The Terminatorâ but the simplicity of having accessible AI engines at our finger tips. Take the app TikTok for instance, not only does it rely on AI to curate a âfor you pageâ unique to each viewer based on their past data, but it also contains many filters that can be used to generate images from simple prompts. When these filters are used to distort ourselves or other individuals that exist in reality, are we negatively affecting the way we view humanity? Does manipulating images of people have any benefits, or are we essentially creating âfalse advertisementsâ in hopes to be perceived in a certain way?
Maria Mavropoulou tests these burning questions with an optimistic point of view. Mavropoulou creates AI photographs of events that have happened in the past and speculative âwhat ifâ scenarios, to fill the void of nostalgia due to the missed capturing of actual photographs throughout her life. Mavropoulou describes the collection of âImagined Imagesâ as healing on a personal level. She was unable to look back on her history in visuals, so instead she creates these images to help understand her past and shape her future.
Being a delusional girly myself, I am all for living in a false narrative world created by my own thoughts and fantasies. I also suffer from the commonly caught illness known as FOMO (For Gen X'rs who mistakenly clicked this Tumblr link expecting to prove how Artificial Intelligence is detrimental, FOMO means Fear of Missing Out), which I think Mavropoulou knows all to well. On a serious note, there is something gut wrenching about not having physical evidence of past events. Photographs encapsulate proof that an individual has truly lived. They freeze time to remind us of memories, which donât always last in the storage of our own minds.
I canât help but wonder if these images mask as a delusion, a way to distract herself from the hurt of not experiencing or retaining these monumental experiences. Is it healthy to find comfort in fiction? Maybe in the form of a good book, but isnât distorting your whole past going a little too far? After all, this isnât The Sims, we canât actually use cheat codes to go in and completely alternate everyone that lives in our world (the default townies are just so... strange).
Although there are positive outcomes of creating images using AI software, there is also equally as many negatives. A big issue we are facing in this current digital age is the use of deepfakes. Deepfakes have been used to make people say explicit phrases and appear a certain way (usually pornographic material). These photos and videos can be created of anyone active in the digital space. If photos and other user data is available, it can be used. Deepfakes have been an extreme controversy in the past, but have recently regained attention when someone created explicit nude photos of (the iconic, might I add) Taylor Swift, and posted them on X. We now have to live with the worrying thought that people can use our images to unconsensually (and also unknowingly) create pornographic material.
I may be hypocritical because I too am part of the problem. I spend most hours of the day on my devices picking the perfect photos and videos of how I want to represent myself on social media, passively scrolling on TikTok until I am fulfilledâ which never happens to be the case â and interacting with posts and filters that I know are obscuring the truth. Maybe we need to share less of our lives online to prevent people from using our information for AI distortion. Maybe if there is one thing we can take away from Mavropoulouâs collection, is the fact that we need to capture the moments in a photograph for personal use. Not a low quality image from an iPhone that constantly over heats because it is used far too often, but a physical camera specifically created way back when to do this exact job. Fuck phone cameras, I want to see someone pull out the heliograph at a bar.
