So imagine you have a bunch of photos on your phone, and then some software finds all your photos from your recent vacation to Brazil, automatically creates a slideshow out of it, and then generates a video where while the slideshow is scrolling, there’s 2 AI podcast hosts talking about your life in the photos. Specifically in this scenario, the vacation to Brazil
One clear reason I can piece together is that it’s narcissistic to want 2 AI humans to talk about your own photos like that
But there’s also something deeply unsettling about this that I can’t exactly piece together. I’m not against generating an AI podcast for like study notes or something for you to listen to while driving or cooking, but it’s super weird if it’s on your own photos right?
Is it the fact that it’s weird to just listen to AI voices talk about your photos and yourself? Like it’s some sort of artificial social interaction?
I think it’s because the action of showing off your vacation photos and talking about them is something that’s established in our culture as a social thing. Yeah we’ve all joked about how lame it can be to sit through someone’s vacation slides when they just go on forever and ever, but for every one of those social interactions there’s a hundred where you just make small talk while flipping through and holding your phone for someone to see and it’s a moment of human connection and sharing your life with another person.
The AI process takes that same activity and strips all of the meaning from it, rendering it uncanny. It reminds me of the androids in Nier who are emulating the visual aesthetics of human society but don’t really understand why they’re doing it.