For most of my life I've had a habit of taking "beauty shots" of really incredible moments that I want to remember - in my head. I'll even blink, as if I am taking a photo. "I will remember this."
This way I have shot the tower bridge in London, lit up at night, while riding on the back of BMW motorcycle. I've clipped the frosted eyelashes and balaclava after a early morning dogsleigh ride in Jukkasjärvi. I've clipped "footage" of myself running downhill through the clouds from twin peaks in San Francisco with my arms spread wide, literally pulling the clouds with me, as I ran to the bus stop from where I would commute to work.
Beauty shots that, maybe a bit morbidly, I thought could show up in that fabeled film that will flash before your eyes when you die that you hear so much about. All of this happened pre-instagram, of course. Memories that I will never find in any photo archive, anywhere, or even recreated in AI.
Post Instagram, everyone began making beauty-shots out of everything. Suddenly, the most mundane latte was something that needed recording. I found myself doing this as well, mainly photographing advertising, and eventually offspring threw herself in the way of the posters that I kept photographing as a form of fun sabotage. Offspring, being so adorable all day every day was so tempting to post everywhere on the internet, but I needed to protect her privacy - and her face.
So I deleted my then Instagram account, and later buckets of Google photos that I had shared with family to avoid the future. I deleted Facebook too, because all the photos there could be used for ads. She, as a young girl roaming the internet, thought deleting the apps themselves was enough to "delete" things. Alas. It was all too little too late.
As many young adults of her generation, she's returned to the analog world of button phones, social game nights, tangible skills and they have largely deserted "social media", except for Snapchat. The recent advertising campaign "Less social media. More Snapchat." understood this phenomenon completely and leaned into it. Good strategy. Well positioned.
The developers of Snapchat, however, have not understood why their users are using snapchat. Suddenly, Snapchat is pushing AI on the users. Without their consent. To a generation that hates AI.
Despite selecting she does not want AI she gets AI
So, suddenly my daughter is getting bad AI renditions of herself, suggested as 'content' to share with her friends. Not only is this insulting to a person who truly and passionatly hates AI - they're also making her look awful. And I'm not just saying this as her mother who thinks she is the most beautiful girl in the world - there is something very uncanny awful about these renditions. In this odd photo below, they seem to have cobbled together some headphone photographs of her with some photographs of her in Gamla Stan in Stockholm, and added a random pigeon. Not sure if this is a new detective series concept - but the body and clothes are certainly not hers and it's all coming off as very creepy. Especially as this popped up after she had made sure to turn off the "AI snaps" new features that had been turned on by default. As new features always do. (Sidenote - this is very uncool when people - like I am - are still connected to now dead friends)
As the internet grows, I recall how different it was when it began. Way back in 1997, I was at HIP97 in Almere Buiten, the Netherlands. In a giant circus tent, a guy from the Chaos Computer club told us to "screw with the data at all times", so at every opportunity that we were presented with, we should mess it up on purpose. He offered an example, that made us all laugh "when I check into a hotel, I rent the porn film, even though I don't watch porn." Sure Jan!
But his point is still correct - with messed up data, AI could not make a good copy of Perl. Better still, with NO data, AI could not make a copy of Perl. Her generation that are logging off and rekindling their "analog" skills are doing the right thing.
I know that I keep harping on about Adland, but as one of the very few websites that lasted that long on the internet, it was a source of data that happened as it was. Most of the internet from that era has vanished, and now AI is training on new internet - meaning it is training on newer articles, newer photographs, newer ideas and newer lies. Even new AI. It already has become the modern Ouroboros.
I read "Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick" when it came out and Tsutomu Shimomura described studying the log files as if looking for footprints in sand, because every step you take disturbs the sand. The current internet is being flooded by new AI bullshit and social media crap that is treated like gospel by increasingly powerful AI tools, who are using other AI tools as sources - the dead internet is not only here. It's farming the third world and idiots while a new generation are using this opportunity to learn crafts and log off, while waiting for the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb. That will bring us together.
We should probably all take Perl's generation's advice and log off a bit more, and ignore AI - because the only thing it can give us is regurgitation of misleading, faulty, and glimpses of missing information that once existed on the internet. These days, a lot of the old internet is gone.
