This is my opinion and my opinion only. You are more than free to disagree with me, but I come from a place where we talked. We shared ideas and viewpoints. Back when we were “Americans”, all of us. Now, we are left, right, MAGA, radical liberals, red, blue, blah, blah, blah… Divisive is the way of our world these days. The toothpaste will never go back into the tube. I am old, but I am not stupid.
AI has ruined any modicum of any trust I ever had with anything I see anymore. This is true in my Kandi world, but even more so in my real world. I trust nothing, ever, at all. I was talking to my partner in my truck enterprise, we both are seeking part-time work, and I lamented that I simply feel completely unsure about responding to anything I see online. I know people much smarter than me who have come to the brink of being scammed and they know better. This is why I give my time to charities, never any money, simply because I trust no one anymore. I am still creeped out that my phone knows where I am going in the morning or after having an actual conversation with my wife (nothing done online or on the phone), our online browsing is filled with whatever we talked about. In the privacy of our own home!
In my Kandi life, I have met many girls in the actual real world. Met them. Connected with them. Then they do all of this AI bullshit online. I’m out. There is no way who I am referring to would know I am talking about her, principally because she is most likely not a reader here. Maybe one out of every twenty pictures she posts are real. Not her. Not possible. I understand doing this to see what might be in another universe, I understand why it might scratch an itch. I have dabbled slightly.
Maybe AI platforms exist that I am unaware of, mostly likely there are. But please stay out of a community that you don’t have the guts to be YOU! This is what tears at the fabric of what a community is, the inability to trust. Trust what you see. Trust who you are. Trust a single word spoken. Trust is gone.
If you go on Facebook and see “CD” reels, none of them are real human beings. All look like biological women (I won’t use “CIS”, sorry), they are in no way of our tribe. The audio is beyond creepy. The woman in the video says it’s her first time out and yet she looks like she just came off the cover of Vogue, perfect female proportions and a voice that can only be described as the same AI feminization of a male voice. It’s the same titillating junk as many of those caption memes. The “CD” or “transwoman” is clearly a biological woman in those. When I do videos, I am trying to reach out to reach human sisters, to show them how real human beings can navigate the world.
Go on Flickr, no one is real anymore. Pull up a YouTube video because the description intrigues you to find out it is a bunch of AI bullshit. Not real. Nothing is real anymore. I hate to say this, while I crave human interaction, I cannot believe anything I see online. Not an email. Not a Messenger. Nothing.
Going back to the genesis of Kandi, 2014, I moved forward, I got comfortable with who and what I am because I met real human beings. And I did so through online platforms when they weren’t bullshit. When they were real people connecting with real people. Then I took that and converted things into actual human interaction. Is that even possible anymore? Can one trust anyone who reaches out?
I had to vent. Am I wrong? Can one trust anyone anymore?
We’ll keep preaching reality here. We’ll keep being human. We will keep going out in the real world and changing minds each and every time we do so. I have significant personal experience, significant. Once that is totally gone, I’ll be totally gone…
10 Responses
As I’ve (ab)used AI more than most here and have been on both sides of the coin, I couldn’t resist jumping in.
I completely get why people use AI to enhance photos. Even 10 years ago when I first dipped into Flickr, it was a highly competitive environment. The number of views, ‘faves’ and followers was everything and people breathlessly exclaimed ’20 million views!’ without stopping to wonder about the questionable algorithm that came up with that number. And when I started posting photos myself, I looked at my photos of the archetypal ‘man in a dress’ and wondered how I could ever compete with those who were at the top of their game. FaceApp to the rescue!
As I’ve written here before, I ended up becoming disillusioned with the whole thing and vowed never to post another doctored image, a vow I have not honoured although when I use AI these days, it’s only to see what I’d look like in a particular outfit or change the background. I still want to look at an image and feel that it’s me.
You’re absolutely right, though, the whole thing has gone out of control. I have the same reaction to an AI image as I do to the dreaded headless shots – what’s the point? Perhaps we should be more conciliatory and say ‘if it helps you deal with all of this, you do you’ but there comes a point when we have to face up to reality. I could never have got to where I did if I hadn’t faced up to the hideous reality in the mirror and vowed to do something about it!
We will always be slaves to camera angles, lighting, focal lengths and everything else and we will probably delete far more photos than we keep. But at least they’re rooted in reality and from time to time one photo will speak to us in a way that no amount of AI generated images ever can.
Just like any technological advancement, there are certainly benefits. Then we take things too far.
Smart phones have remarkable advantages, for example. And they have also basically eliminated human-to-human interaction from the world.
Appreciate you, Mandy!
Hi Kandi:
As one who enjoys the photographic and artistic side of our proclivity, I personally find the presence of AI and its overuse/abuse kind of a distracting nuisance. I’ve experimented with it to be sure, and it is a lot of fun to try on new outfits, place yourself in new environments or come up with clever and amusing images. If you post publicly it can be quite engaging but should in my opinion always be accompanied with a message or * that indicates the image is AI generated, even if it’s obvious it has been. I feel any less is just phony.
A bigger annoyance for me as a photographic hobbyist is that so many of the legitimate photographic edits we can do for our images – adjust color, exposure, erase objects, blur background and such are now powered by AI. When you use those tools it renders the entire photograph suspect in appearance and can often make our primary subject – ourselves – look AI generated as well. In an effort not to appear AI generated it further limits the photos we can use for public display without being labeled AI.
Just my 2 cents.
Best,
Kris
Thanks Kris! The bottom line for me is a complete lack of trust in anything anymore, regardless of if it’s from our little corner of the world or everyday life.
It is absolutely true that the way systems and machines of today work is mind boggling, and to a great many people utterly incomprehensible. A flowing stream with a water wheel with wooden gears attached to a large heavy millstone was pretty easy to understand. Our ‘smart’ phones, not to mention an automatic transmission? Not so much, and that is OK. No one can understand everything, no one can know everything. What everyone does to deal with their own blind spots is form a workable world view, a conceptual framework, that allows them to get through the day without being totally freaked out by everything they encounter.
AI is neither ‘A’, nor ‘I’ as I see things. It is certainly not artificial, and it is not yet intelligence (the definitions of intelligence are, however, broad and in dispute). AI is computers, lots of them, doing what computers do well; storing data, finding specific items within that data, and then spitting it out. The AI chatbots only ‘know’ what has been put into them; they, as yet, do not come up with new information. AI is data retrieval on a massive scale.
The fake visuals that AI creates are wildly complex and wildly dense data assemblages, and they are fascinating and ‘fake’ at once. It has been many years now that photographs could not be admissable as unquestioned evidence in legal issues; photo manipulation has been going on for decades, and certainly when PhotoShop came on the scene the ‘truth’ of photographs went out the window. Today, AI visual images are, according to many experts in the field, totally impossible to pick out; they are now too well done, too accurate, to tell if they are ‘real’ or not.
OK, so where does this leave us? Kandi is spot on about being able to ‘trust’ what we see, what we hear today. It can all be a ‘deep fake.’ One answer to this new and perplexing state of affairs is that the whole concept of ‘trust’ may not be what we use to guide us in our journey through the world each day. Like many others, I see beautiful, intriguing images online that the sceptic, the realist, in me knows are ‘not real.’ They are engaging images, but I do not expect what they are to show up at my local grocery store.
In today’s complex world of machines, vast data, and the manipulation of such for illegal, or immoral gain all of us should stay sharp, be well informed, be skeptical and critical of what we are seeing and hearing. In a bowl filled with peanuts, there is clarity and certainty. In a bowls of mixed nuts, things become less clear and less certain. We all live in a huge bowl of mixed nuts today. It is still possible to live and to experience actual realities in the world but the edges have been blurred. Enjoy what you see but know that what is presented as ‘reality’ is not what it used to be.
Onward for all of us!
Marissa in Ohio
Two Marissa comments! What did I do to deserve this? So awesome and I always love your perspective.
Kandi,
It is becoming extremely difficult to trust someone. But I absolutely trust Kandi Robbins.
I have sat beside her, I have walked with her, I have laughed with her, I have hugged her, I have had long talks with her, I have learned from her, I have trusted her, and I have loved her.
Kandi, you are a wonderful and trusted friend. That gives me complete comfort in this world.
From the other side of Lake Ontario,
Jocelyn
Fils me with pride!
I never use any tools (except cropping) with the photos I have taken, both here with my posts and on Flickr. I tried FaceApp once and produced an obviously exaggerated feminine image of myself, which I have not shared anywhere. But I am getting tired of seeing many people on sites post nothing but AI slop. Like you said, Kandi, you really can’t trust these things online, as people are, for the most part, unwilling to label anything as AI. It would almost be better to label as NOT AI, but even that would lead people to question the truthfulness of the post. All we can do is continue on our path, proclaiming our point of view on authenticity.
Kandi,
Those who choose to still use social media with AI are entering world of make-believe , very little is as it seams and we have no way of proving truth or miss-truth . It is as you comment a World without trust , how can we prove if a speech given by your president or our prime minister was a genuine speech or even if originated in our home countries ?
Before AI the transgender community was often be based on a certain amount of BS , only experience allowed us to glean the truth form the dross but at least we dealt with it face to face . While it’s difficult for some the only way we can discover truth from fiction is to totally ignore social media , this is why I’ve never been a follower .
From a recent Email I discovered Windows 11 uses AGENDY AI which means it’s autonomous , instead of you choosing to rely on an AI answer the new version will make the decisions for you , I personally think we have gone too far , we are entering an unpredictable future . While on the one hand we can expect humans to make mistakes , we usually deal with human failings but a world of AI where we may not be able to deal with it’s mistakes is something we need to think very seriously about .