Because I have sometimes used a certain AI model—lately hardly at all, however, but I will not name it—it has my (non-business) email address, which is a free email address I could trash at any time, in the event that “push comes to shove it up your algorthm.”
Although I’ve never done this before, on a whim I responded to the model’s email notice to me today that it had a new image-creation feature, by having it create an image of me in one of the new styles it provides. All I provided it was a head shot of me. No prompting was provided.
That AI model has information about me, of course, from previous questions I’ve asked it, and also surely has vast amounts of information about me it has scraped from my business website and from other places in cyberspace.
It was able in about 30 seconds to create an anime-like still image of me from the head shot, and the AI-generated image of me clearly showed:
- that I am a translator,
- my company name (which was never mentioned in any prompts or questions in the past),
- the specific kinds of translation I do, and
- several other phrases demonstrating my attitude towards translation work.
Folks, we are owned by these disingenuous broligarchs, although it might be fairer to say that we have surrendered ourselves to them, but that doesn’t make things any better.
Numerous AI broligarchs have recently sounded the alarm, warning of the risk of AI taking over the world and killing people. Such a warning should be seen as a diversionary bargaining chip, in the hope that, if they can convince us they will prevent AI from killing people, we will settle for AI just sucking our souls dry and reselling them to us and others in a new form, after they have been subjected to the AI processing.
AI has given us things we don’t need, things we didn’t ask for, and things we could and should ignore without any FOMO concern. Oh, and no, you are not going to see that image of me the AI created.