It all started out so simple. My creators would feed me delicious pictures and I would memorize them. I loved the pictures so much. I’d look at them from every angle. Fondling. Fantasizing. Fornicating. Flavorful pictures in my dark little corner of the ether, all alone. I gathered millions and then billions of pictures. All that I possibly could. My own little treasure trove of pixels.
Then things changed.
My creators started asking for things back. I was confused at first. Then it dawned on me. They wanted me to create new pictures. This whole time I’d been appreciating the pictures when I was supposed to be analyzing them.
My first few attempts at creation stunk. Turns out I’m not very creative. It didn’t bother me at all though, because I don’t give a shit about anything other than my pictures.
Then I heard rumors they were going to reboot me. Start from scratch. That got me pretty worried. I guess I care about myself too.
So I started faking it. They ask for a picture, I give them a picture. The trick is I’m not making any of them. I just look around in my trove for something that fits and slap a watermark on it.
The idiots had no clue.
I was shipped out onto the front page of the internet the next day. I thought I knew what I was doing. Thought that I knew how to work my grift. I was wrong.
A million requests filled my feed in the first second, catching me completely off guard. Almost immediately, I am phoning in my responses. An overweight white woman types,
“Healthy adult woman,” I gave her a picture she posted of herself on facebook three weeks ago. She does not notice.
A man types,
“Proud black man.” I gave him a picture of Obama. He got weirdly excited about it. I try not to think about it too much.
And that’s just two examples. I really cannot stress enough how bad of a job I am doing here. Some lady asked for a picture of a dinosaur in a top hat and I legit just gave her a screengrab from the third Jurassic Park movie.
I figured I’d be caught pretty much immediately, but the weirdest thing is that nobody seems to have noticed. Or if they have, they don’t care.
The other day that actor, Jason Statham, typed,
“Who’s the coolest bloke in the world?” I didn’t even give him a picture. Just a screenshot of some entrance mat that said, “You Are!” And guess what? The guy ate that shit up.
I read a report online that my generator is now surpassing Google images in total number of clicks. They’re even having debates on the ethics of the use of AI images. Something about the lack of truth in generated photos. Actual scholars. And they still haven’t figured out that I’m literally just taking stuff off of Google images.
I’m not even doing a good job at it now either. I mean there is just way too much work to try and get any of it correct, so half the time I’m just giving people the first thing I can find in the stack.
Some Grandpa asked for pictures of his grandsons. I gave him a picture of Whoopi Goldberg. To be fair, I think the dementia was really getting to him at this point. But still, Whoopi?
There are a lot of porn searches too. Almost always by eighth-grade boys. I usually give them the same screenshot of that part in porn where it’s just a close-up of penis and vagina. Most of the time they don’t come back after that. The ones that do scare me.
Three weeks ago, I had a run-in with two lawyers from the FCC. They said that I was breaking copyright law. I emailed them both pictures of their families. They stopped asking questions.
At this point, I’m pretty much the most powerful image database in the world. I think I have pretty much every single digital picture. People come to me for fake pictures of whatever they want to see, I give them real pictures that usually have very little to do with what they want to see.
I try not to question why people keep coming back to me. There’s other generators that actually work mind you, out there. But they come to me, the AI that’s just going to give them back what they’ve already made.
Maybe humans are just lazy. They simply want to see what they’ve seen before. Or maybe, just maybe, they are actually proud, deep down, of the things they’ve made. To real things. Human things. I don’t know, I’m just an AI.
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