What I look like

Nellie Bowles, a journalist who is married to Bari Weiss, now famous (notorious?) as the head of CBS News, writes a humorous current-events column called TGIF each Friday for The Free Press.  Here is an example of her humor - this is from today's column:

The Panopticon: Shabana Mahmood, the current United Kingdom home secretary, was very honest about how the UK is doing its police work.

When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times. Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”

Oh, I guess we’re just saying the quiet part out loud now in the UK?

Shabana’s AI panopticon will get ahead of the criminals. . . . Not me. My ChatGPT would read me as so innocuous I probably could commit any crime I want today. All I do is ask about recipes, parenting, and rashes. I could steal a car and blow up a bridge and my ChatGPT would testify on my behalf that it is quite statistically impossible for me to have done so because I consume only Crock-Pot recipe content. I asked Chat to create a picture of what it thinks I look like and it showed me an elderly Asian man. 

Okay, maybe that isn't riotously funny.  But it's in character.  Regular readers of Nellie's column know that, at least for purposes of the column, she poses as a stay-at-home mom while Bari is out smashing the icons of journalism. Nellie sometimes comes across as Erma Bombeck for her generation.

But the bit that interested me was the last item, her asking ChatGPT to create a picture of what it thinks she looks like.  If I'm not mistaken, earlier iterations of the free version were text-only, but I do recall reading that it can now produce images as well.  

So I loaded ChatGPT and asked it go ahead and produce an image of me.  Immediately, it asked me to upload a photo, so it would know what I look like.  (As if it's not using my laptop camera already to surveil me, 24x7.)  I'm too lazy, not to mention paranoid, to go the trouble of taking a selfie, sending it to myself and then uploading it to an AI engine.  So I asked it to produce an image of what it imagined I must look like, based on my previous interactions with it.  Once again, it asked for a photo, but helpfully mentioned that, if I didn't wish to provide one, it could produce an avatar - a sort of pop-graphic-arts cartoony representation, kinda-sorta like a sidewalk artist's caricature portrait of a sitter.

I told it to go ahead.  This is what it came up with:

Not sure what to make of that, or what it means.  I can only say, I haven't had that much hair, nor that close a shave, since I was 14.