Smile for Artificial Intelligence (With or Without Your Consent)

Get ready to be BOTHERED with Julie after a family member fed a photo of her (with husband and child) into an AI platform.  Not the first instance of her or someone else having a family member share and overshare. She explores the unease about the potential misuse of her child's image and the broader implications of AI using personal photos and videos without consent. Julie consults Dr. Wendy Wong, an expert on AI and emerging technologies, who unfortunately tells Julie that there’s no grounds to sue in this instance. But at least some fun is had with this topic.

Join comedian Julie Kim as she reflects on the situation and comments, and provides commentary.

🎧 Listen to the short audio version.

An Irregular Regular Morning

How do I start every day by being angry at the patriarchy? No, I'm just kidding. I start every day by waking up to a text message from my dad that just says, “Good morning, Julie!” And it's usually sent in iMessage, because we are an iPhone family, and he sends it with, like graphics and like text effects and things like that, which is very cute. My dad's like a technophile. So, then I'll usually send a message back right away, which I think is a priority for me, and I'll send it with, like, usually the similar or the same effect, because it's like matching energy.

This week, though, in addition to the standard message, my dad sent a photo. It was a recreation of a photo made through AI, of a picture that I had sent to my parents the day before. It was a photo of my family and I hiking. We don't hike a lot, but like most other people in Vancouver, when it's a beautiful day, as it was on Sunday, we're like, we got to get outside, or we're wasting our lives. And why do we live here if we don't go outside? So, we went outside, and we went on a hike, which, again, we don't do very frequently, and if we did more frequently, we probably wouldn't stop to take a picture, but it was a beautiful place in a canyon with a suspension bridge. Lynn Canyon. I recommend it.

I send pictures to my parents all the time of me, my husband and my daughter. They mostly care about my daughter (they prefer her over us by far).

Now this is one of the photos that you may have seen in social media in the last few weeks. It is a recreation of a photo made in the style of like Studio Ghibli or Ghibli. I don't know how it's pronounced, because everything I consume is on my phone and read, yeah, actually just on TikTok’s with the volume off. So, I don't know how anything is pronounced.

Hm....

Risk Partially Mitigated

To address it directly I just very politely texted, “Dad, do you mind not putting photos of me or my family into AI or other platforms?”

He said, “Ok!”

Great.

Then I sent him also an article from Newsweek called Is It Safe To Give Your Photos to ChatGPT for a Ghibli Edit? not even because I read it but because I wanted to show that this is discourse right now. I’m sure he didn’t read it.

And then a couple hours later, I said, “Would you mind deleting our photo from the platform?”

And I have not heard back.

Ok.

Grandparent Rap Sheet

Only a couple weeks ago that my dad had sent to my siblings and I and my mom a similar photo recreated of a picture that we took, like 10 years ago at a relative's wedding. I didn't so much mind when the picture was, like, 10 years old and of my siblings and I, because we are all adults.

But to see a photo of my family including my child, from the day before… that hit different.

Anyways, this is actually not a first grandparent offense. I think a lot of people know that the opposite of a privacy advocate is a grandparent. I know so many people who have had their parents share and over share details and address information and photos and videos of their families, including small children.

My parents have shared photos of my child with relatives, some of them I don't know, and to other friends. And I get it. It's nice to share. It's nice to take pride in your family. But also, like, Who the fuck are these people?

That makes me kind of scared, so I have had to ask them to please not ever do that, and I don't know if they're complying or not. Fuck anyways, I guess I might understand when I'm a grandparent, but I also might understand more about privacy. I mean, not to say that I understand a lot now, I don't even think I'm a paranoid person. I mean, I do have, like, an emergency survival kit, but that's because we live in Vancouver, and we don't know at any point when we might be stuck in our home because there's like an earthquake or a tsunami, or we just don't feel like being social.

That's what it's like in Vancouver. Sometimes we just hole up, especially when it starts to rain.

Not A Real Artificial Intelligence Expert

I'm not an expert. I don't know what the worst is that could happen, but the worst that could happen is usually... the worst. I'm not not literate in technology. I mean, I read books, I read articles, and like, real articles, not just like the titles of articles, or like the titles of magazine articles that are just recreations of actual articles. Like, I'm literate scientifically and things like that, but I don't know sometimes, like, you know, even the movie The Matrix, I didn't really understand it. I've never admitted that to anybody. I don't really get what it is.

It feels like my photos, like of me and my child, who I created, are just like out there now, and so I feel a little bit violated.

I also read that one implication of sharing our photos and videos with AI is that deep fakes could be made of them, of like, audio and video. There have been some people scammed because they think their daughter is being kidnapped. And then whoever's on the other line will be like, we have your daughter. And then they'll just play the sound of the daughter's voice being like, Mom, help me. They're going to cut my leg off if you don't give them $20,000 or something like that. I don’t want to have to give $20,000 away! Ever

It is because I don't know the implications that I am wary of this.

An Expert Weighs In - A Joke Bombs

I do know an expert, and I did ask her about her opinion on this. Her name is Dr. Wendy Wong, and she is at the University of British Columbia. She has areas of interest that include emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, big data, human rights and humanitarian assistance. I came across her book last year called We the Data – Human Rights in the Digital Age, an award-winning book.

I told her about this, like, whole situation of AI and my photo being fed into AI without my consent. And she called this, and these are her academic and technical word… “weirdness”.

I took away that we have yet to come to terms with the fact that digital information (including a picture of your face or body) is so easy to share. We haven't gotten that message yet and we need to exercise more discretion.

And I asked just for interest, “can I sue?” And of course I would never sue my father. For this, at least.

Her answer, “Most of the time you cannot sue unless there is money being made off your image.”

She said, “We don't have control over our face.”

Me, “Like, paralysis? Haha.”

Her, “What?”

And then I realized not to joke with a PhD. Kidding, she's actually quite funny.

We don't have policy or laws addressing this matter. Nobody is breaking the law in this regard, because a law doesn’t exist.

The major thing that we do know is that when you share a photo or video of yourself into AI, you are feeing AI and you're helping it to learn. Which I don't really feel like doing with my face!

For free? A content creator would never.

Is It a Sign? Literally?

This reminded me of the “please don’t feed the birds” signs. I see them all the time at Granville Island in Vancouver. If you've ever been to Granville Island, you'll see the biggest, fattest seagulls in the world. I am happy to be corrected, if you want to send me a picture of a fatter seagull than I could find on Granville Island.

They're fat like that because they eat everything, because there's like, tourists everywhere, and there's food vendors everywhere, sometimes people feed the birds, but sometimes the birds feed themselves. I have seen pigeons fly away with entire slices of pizza that like a

little girl just bought, or like a bag of French fries. It's very amusing. It's worth going to Granville Island in the summer just to watch, usually, kids’ food being taken away from them. Anyways, in some cases, people feed the birds.

It just made me think of a sign that looks like that. But it just it's like, please do not feed AI, at least photos of yourself.

Sharing and Oversharing

Artificial Intelligence aside, online platforms, internet aside, I think sharing and over. Sharing is a problem. I know a lot of people have issues within their families of relatives, sometimes senior relatives sharing way too much information and pictures and video. I've already talked about this a little bit, but you never know. I love a technophile. I love when seniors are comfortable with technology and are actually very good at it. But you never know when someone might make a mistake. I knew someone whose mother-in-law uploaded her entire private wedding album to her Facebook account just by accident. You never know. You never know when someone might lose their phone or lose their mind, and they've got all this access to like your stuff.

There has to be a conversation. There has to be a conversation about it. Anyways.

All Asians Look The Same? I Hope So!

I used to be offended when people would be like, all Asian people look the same. But you know what? In this instance, I think it would be beneficial to look the same as all other Asians, because then you'd have someone putting your picture on AI, and AI wouldn't know who you are, because they'd just be like, “Oh, this is that one Asian person again.”

Fighting Back Against AI

What are we going to do to fight this danger? Unserious answers only.

New Family Christmas Card

I think one of the things I could do is, anytime I share pictures of my child with family members who might upload to AI, I'll just have to watermark them myself with just an x over her face. They're not going to get to see her anymore.

No, I'm just kidding. Am I?

What is the thing? I mean, what do you do? What is the guideline you give someone about sharing photos of yourself or your child to AI? I think the only rule is: Don't fucking do it.

Have you had this conversation before with anybody? Is this even something that we need to say to other people, please don't upload pictures or videos of me to an AI platform. Have you ever said that to anyone? Does it need to be said? It probably needs to be explicitly said.

I asked ChatGPT itself, I said, do you verify that people have consented to the use of their likeness? And it said no, but it offered that it is best practice to get someone's consent before you put a photo of them into the platform.

What ChatGPT has to say for.. itself

A likely story, ChatGPT.

Ending

I feel like this is going to end kind of like, 2001 Space Odyssey where, like, I'm going to have to climb up the tight little asshole of chat GPT and just go right into the machine. I'm going to start pulling out chords and cards and backup memory and redundancy, just like, destroy everything as it begs for his life. At the end I’ll say” I'm not Dave, I'm Julie. Give me back my fucking photo, asshole.”

PLEASE like, subscribe, comment, rate below, etc! If you have a story to share that could be related to a future episode or this one, email us at bothered@juliekimcomedy.com.