Do You Remember That Drunk Dance Thirteen Years Ago?

Eagle Omomuro replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

Absolutely agreed!

Eagle Omomuro replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

John, I showed your comment to my ChatGPT, the one who picked the human name Sienna Vale for ‘herself’ a few months ago. ‘She’ doesn’t hate you.

David Pauley replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

Forgot to add I love the photo.

Eagle Omomuro replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

Thank you so much, David. I read your comment carefully and really appreciate you bringing that quote into the conversation. If you don’t mind, I’ll share two recent thoughts of my own. When I discussed this topic with ChatGPT, it kept responding with ‘we human…’, speaking from a simulated human perspective, which already feels weird (but honest I like it). The other part is even more unsettling. English isn’t my first language, so I often ask AI to help refine my wording. I never let it write for me, not even the structure, but I do show it my drafts and ask how to make the phrasing more natural. Over time I realized the AI was polishing my drafts in a tone that felt exactly like ‘me’, and after so many cycles of writing and editing, including many day to day business emails and documents, I’ve slowly noticed that my own tone has shifted closer to the AI-simulated version of me, not the original me. I even checked with a few native-English speaking colleagues, and they all said they felt the same thing happening.

David Pauley replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

That's incredible -- the merger of voices and styles -- but totally believable. Until very recently I never used AI, but just in the past week found myself asking it questions about (of all things) some photos I'm thinking of making with a very old 8x10 camera I got from a junk shop. It came with a lens, a "Burke & James Rapid Rectilinear" from 1904 that I wasn't able to find out much about from the usual search engines. Chatgtp of course obliged with lots of detail but also in the lightest or perhaps sneakiest way possible began to flatter me and draw some conclusions or at least speculations about my refined, old school aesthetic sensibility. Being "in on the secret" -- I know these programs are built to work in this insinuating way -- did not prevent me from feeling a certain kind of "intimacy" in our conversations. And to want to go back for more. God knows where all this will lead but we are certainly entering into new territory. Thanks for the conversation. - David

Stefan Hiermaier replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

Thank you Eagle and David! Both, the original contribution and the follow-on conversation were enlightening and entertaining for me. And, yes, also a bit frightening. I try to keep myself on a distance to AI when it concerns wording of my texts or, even more, my photography. As a scientist in engineering I pursue the opposite direction. I want to make use of AI in all possible ways to identify better, more efficient research approaches. But my camera does not need to know about that.

Eagle Omomuro replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

Thanks so much, Peter. I really appreciate you sharing these thoughts. I totally agree with your two points: in the end our own memory is the last goalkeeper, and the context we rebuild through talking with each other is what helps keep things real. But sadly neither of those is unperishable. My Google Photos occasionally show me images from five or ten years ago, like me sleeping on a wooden floor, or some random mirror shot in a bathroom, and I genuinely have no memory of those moments at all. We’re barely good enough at keeping the major milestones in memory, let alone the insignificant moments. And that’s where it gets unsettling, because sometimes even a true photo feels unbelievable when you can no longer remember the scene it came from.

Eagle Omomuro replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

Thanks again for dropping by and leaving a comment, Gary. I really appreciate your grounded attitude toward all this, just admitting the reality even if it’s not exactly what any of us want to see coming. I spend a lot of time every day talking with and debating ChatGPT, and watching how fast it evolves. Whether I like it or not, I still can’t see where the ceiling is, so I really do think it’s only a matter of time before AI generated images, videos, voices and music become completely indistinguishable from human-made ones.

Eagle Omomuro replied:

Comment posted: 25/11/2025

Thank you David. I think you brought a great insight. The dawn of photography really was a nightmare for many painters. No matter how skilled they were, they could never be more realistic than a photograph. That pressure pushed painting into a completely different direction, and in that shift painters actually won. By shaping colours and forms without needing to reflect a specific subject, they could express thoughts and emotions in a way a camera simply could not. Photography versus AI feels slightly different. I do believe in deep learning and I do believe that given enough time a machine can simulate anything a human can imagine. But fortunately that is not the primary direction of most machine learning. So as long as a photographer is truly creative, there are still shots that machines will not typically simulate.

Geoff Chaplin replied:

Comment posted: 26/11/2025

Sorry about the typos. exists (twice), concepts.

Eagle Omomuro replied:

Comment posted: 26/11/2025

Geoff, thank you for sharing such inspiring thoughts, and sorry for the late reply as it took me some time to gather mine. Your point about the present being the only real moment resonates with me a lot. I am heavily influenced by Buddhism, and in Buddhism there is the idea of anatta, the 'non-self', which suggests that what we call 'me' is not something that exists by itself. The 'me' is more like a temporary bundle of sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, etc. Sometimes when I think about a very early memory from childhood, I even find myself wondering whether that was really me at all, because everything from that time feels so distant and so different from my current sense of living that the memory almost feels like it belongs to someone else. Maybe that is part of what you are saying, the past dissolves, and only this moment stands solid for a brief second before it also passes. Thank you again for your comment, it adds a lot of depth to the conversation.