Of the myriad AI prompts out there, this one is a clear favourite by a mile. Mind you, chatGPT knows me well, I converse with it multiple times a day, from bouncing off ideas to indulging my silly questions. Programmed to be a sarcastic, smartass genius with a taste for dark humour, ChatGPT knows of me but not me. It knows me as Madras Ponnu or MP – the sobriquet I go by on the Internet. It doesn’t know my face. It created this image from my MP logo though every other aspect seems eerily on point.
When I shared this prompt, a few friends commented about the various aspects of the generated image – consensus being the bad ass imagery!
This egregious collage of elements that supposedly depicted me delivered a reality check that was not on the to do list for the day.
Iam a faceless content creator. I don’t put my face out on the internet- not even on LinkedIn. It’s less about paranoia and more about not being taken seriously as a medical researcher if people perceived me a coffee blogger, albeit one with just a meagre 2000 followers.
So ChatGPT doesn’t know my face. I have never uploaded a picture of myself wearing a saree and a leather jacket – a combination I have worn in real life.
An attire I adorned with ease, pleasure, more often than a pair of denims and somehow gave up in the recent years.
This image shocked me in to the undeniable reality that I have communicated so much with an AI model, it has predicted aspects of my dark, sarcastic, undeniably rebellious side despite obfuscating features of my face.
While everyone was praising ChatGPT on its accuracy, I was feeling oddly contrite. Despite this unsettling true depiction of my self, there were pieces on the collage I could barely identify with. When did I tone down? For whom?
Did I shrink down and soften my edges or has adulting with a matured partner quietly archived my fire breathing dragon mode?
The irony is not lost of me that an AI model mirrored back a version of me that was on the back burner. A much needed jolt into remembering who I was before I learnt to edit myself.
Here’s to posting random things in the internet for the sheer joy of being creative with apps and photos, to never caring about the views, followers or this damn algorithm that no one seems to understand, to feeding more doggos despite the frowns, geting back to the unparalleled joy of solo dates with my awesome self, wearing that saree more often than not, filter kaapi not words and choosing to ignore the imposter syndrome more often than not.