Daddy's Drunk Again, my bluegrass duet, has a gig booked in my hometown at the beginning of next month. The bar where we'll play has already contacted the local press to announce the concert, and has provided them with a photo they found on our website.

So far, so good. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But the other half of that duet noticed that the picture, as published by some local news sites, had been edited, undoubtedly by some kind of generative AI.

Check it out (original photo on the left, altered one on the right, click on the pictures to get them in full size):

I appreciate how the bot helpfully hid my pinky sticking out (a bad habit of mine that tends to get captured every time someone reaches for a camera). Too bad said pinky looks like it's been cut off as a result. Also, it apparently decided I should be playing an E chord instead of whatever I was doing.

But beyond laughing at the silly details, my main reaction is to ask why ?

I'm not claiming the original picture was perfect, and I'm sure it could use some editing. I honestly don't have an eye for that stuff. But I don't see how the one that got published is any better, even disregarding the various nonsensical modifications that just make it look fake.

I suspect someone (I doubt it was the bar that booked us) simply used automated editing tool "just in case",¹ without noticing or caring that the tool integrated with some AI that happily hallucinated random changes no one had asked for.

Which makes no sense to me. Using the original file would have been faster than messing with it, and would have looked better.

The other hyposthesis is that no one even did anything, and that some piece of software (an email client, a phone OS, a CMS platform... who knows) automatically decided to "enhance" the picture as it passed through it. I know youtube has done this, and phones have been offering this feature for a while now.

The first option would be disapointing. The second one is terrifying to me.

I guess that's what they mean when they say you can't escape AI. Whether you like it or not, someone is going to force it on you no matter what. And here I am hoping that that someone is at least human.

This particular example is just one out of a billion, but it's the first time it happens to me and I'm split between getting pissed and not even caring.

It's not an embarassing or incrinminating deepfake. It's not conveying false information,² and its reach it gonna stay pretty limited, so it's really not a huge deal. But still.

Had we decided to use AI to edit our stuff, then whether or not that was worth it would be our problem. But we didn't, and now this fake version of us is out there, potentially making us look like AI endorsers (we both stand pretty firmly on the "anti" side of this debate).

All this for no benefit whatsoever to anyone.

I'll contact the website as soon as I'm done ranting on here and ask if the file can be replaced, as well as whether the alteration was intentional of not. I don't plan to point my finger or blame anyone for this, as I just don't see what use that would be. But I would like to know when and where that happened, and which of my two hypothesis is right.

We'll see if something comes out of it. I'll edit this post or write a new one if it's of any interest.

Until then, I'll keep bitching to myself about how the web is getting more and more fucked with each passing day.

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Post Scriptum:

So I wanted to link to a specific example of unsollicited AI modifications I remembered reading about some months, maybe a year ago. I went looking for it and gave up after almost two hours of finding nothing but adds pointing to stupid online, AI powered and proud of it editing tools.

Fuck you, internet.