Ghost in the Machine
Scrolling through X—ugh, I deleted the app, so now I use the browser to look at it on my phone—a post from Farhad Manjoo caught my eye.
It’s a screen cap of a picture of five elderly men dressed like veterans sitting on a plane. Below the photo it says, “The real heroes are not in Hollywood.”
If you look a little more closely, it screams janky A.I. Which commercial airliner has five seats in a row next to the window? God knows what army they belong to: There are eagles, and stripes, but no stars. And what is that writing on their hats? Not English, not a human language.
Manjoo had copied the odd image from somewhere else on the internet and added the comment: “We should honor these men, look what war has done to their hands.”
But the extra fingers, Manjoo’s joke, the gibberish hats, the five seats in the row were not the reasons I knew this image was fake. You see, the man seated closest to the “camera” is my dad. He’s been dead for 14 years.
It stopped me in my tracks. I wanted to find out where this image had sprung from. I mean, I already kind of knew, and also knew there’s likely no way of knowing for sure. In our new reality of vast, untraceable digital plagiarism—created from us but not by us—it feels very hard to know anything for sure.
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