Let’s face it, I’m not the most photogenic person on the planet, and I’ve been needing a decent author pic for some time. The need came to a head (pun intended) when I was asked to participate on a panel for a writer’s conference and the organizers insisted on a recent photo. So, at long last, after many goofy candidates got ridiculed and rejected by my wife, here’s the official Patrick Cumby author photo:
Now, for those of you who’ve read this far, here’s the REAL scoop on this photo:
It’s not a photo at all...
It’s an AI representation of my face, created by a system called Headshot Pro that takes a dozen or so selfies you submit and uses the images to build a virtual model of your features that you can pose, clothe, and light any way you want. Given the subject matter of the books I write, this is something I wanted to experiment with so I could understand the technology and its implications. This is exciting but scary, stuff, y’all. The artificial face in this image looks just like me, but it’s *not* me. There’s no technical reason why the data behind this image couldn’t be animated and combined with AI voice duplication apps to make videos of me singing Italian opera or screaming out a speech from Adolph Hitler or something equally horrible.
So, the AI dilemma:
Systems like Headshot Pro provide a valuable service for a minimal fee. But they also potentially take revenue from human practitioners, in this case, portrait photographers, who can’t come close to duplicating the ease and low cost at which images like this can be produced by AI. Add to that the potential for the image data to be used for biometric hacking, privacy breaches, and the potential for deepfakes, and you see the conundrum.
I’m not here to judge the merits or drawbacks of AI. I’m here to *understand* them, and to use that understanding to inform my writing. What I know is that AI is already being used to make amazing medical breakthroughs and engineering miracles that will greatly benefit humanity. But it’s also being used to to replace human workers and to create fake news and dangerous media disinformation. Where will it lead? It’s too early to tell yet, but it won’t be long before each of us–and the world’s governments and capitalists–will have to make some truly difficult choices. If policies and regulations can’t be quickly put in place that encourage the positive use of AI’s capabilities and outlaw the negative uses, then, well, I think I’ve already seen that movie and read that book a hundred times.
Stay tuned…
