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Comment by barrell | Hacker News Reader

I get the concern here, and emotionally I share it. Half of my contacts now have very strange AI avatars as their profile pictures and I still recoil a little every time I see them (the avatars). I think it's a slippery slope and I don't like where it seems to be going.

However, rationally, it's not like humanity has had picture perfect representations of themselves for very long. For most of our evolution, we relied on paintings & sculptures, which it was up to the artist (or the commissioner) to decide on how 'real' they were, and they were almost always "complete fantasy made to mimic reality".

From this lens, the use of unedited real photos of you was the strange period of time, not this AI age we seem to be headed into.

Maybe that helps put your mind a little at ease, maybe it just confuses you more (definitely the latter for me)

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My primary point is that I think it's fine to use an obviously generated "cartoon image" as an avatar, but what I think is dangerous is when reality and fantasy blur so much that people (including, especially, the subjects themselves!) get lost with respect to which is which.

It's a similar concern to the updated TikTok "makeup filter" that made the rounds recently, which basically is extremely difficult to detect as a filter. I thought especially poignant was a photographer who was saying she gets these beautiful women in to do portraits, and then when they look behind the camera to view their untouched portraits, they're aghast at how "ugly" they are, because the "filtered" version of themselves has started competing with the real version in their own head.

This shit just fucks with everyone's brain long term, in an unhelpful way, in my opinion.

You realize what you described isn't a new phenomena. Paintings that were done followed a similar principle but often even more extreme. Men would make themselves look taller, hide physical deformities, etc... They would imagine themselves being greater than they actually are.

I feel like you missed the point of my response. Nobody is confusing a painting for the real thing. People understand they are idealized.

Professional photography for LinkedIn headshots is also an example of it being idealized. And my team's photo is not one of me having a beer on the beach for a reason.

This is just at my desk without being worried about if I've shaved since I can tell the AI (maybe not this one) to remove my facial stubble.

> For most of our evolution, we relied on paintings & sculptures

For most of our evolution we relied on a little thing known as "real life". The idea of the masses routinely representing their identity through imagery is firmly an artifact of the internet age. The UK didn't even have photos on driver's licenses until 1998.

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