It Finally Happened

9 August 2026

It finally happened.

A family member of mine used AI to generate a photo of two of my dead relatives. After they specifically asked me a year ago about the tech and I said don't do it, don't fall for the lies, they will use your grief to get data. And they agreed at the time. I even showed them the info we had about the fallout of using the tech, how it ruins water supplies, and yet here we are. They chose to conviently forget everything I told them. All for what, to feel better cause you got one new picture of two family members that doesn't even look like them?

The real kicker was showing me the picture. For some context, one of my family members died when I was very young in an accident, so I don't remember much about them. But the smile on thier face looked so wrong. It didn't look like any of the pictures we have. The other family member, one I was closer to, had the wrong body shape, wrong smile on thier face, the eyes were off. It wasn't them. GenAi can only guess, and it guessed wrong. I wanted to puke. I know that sounds like I'm being dramatic, but seeing the picture felt so wrong. I can't say it enough, that is not them in the picture. It's what a computer thinks should look like them.

This happening during a period of time where I'm already going through a lot mental health wise is also not helping. I've been fighting so hard to get out of this funk I'm in, and I'm failing. Then this happens, and I get very angry. I told them they had crossed a line. Of course they tried using every excuse they could to justify it (it's just like photoshop!), but I said I'm not letting this one go. My advice was ignored all for the sake of some temporary happiness that will not bring those two back. I'm still not over my grief. This probably set me back a bit if I'm being honest.

What really bugs me is I was told they got permission to do this. Yeah okay, but the two dead people, did they consent to it? Did they say it was okay? I know for a fact one of them hated anything to do with computers, but you are sure they would be so okay with some computer stealing thier likeness and making up a fake picture of them. After a lot of arguing back and forth, they finally said they fucked up and want my forgiveness. What is my forgiveness going to do? The AI that you used already has them in thier data set now. You can't take it out. Once you put them in, that's it, that's all the permission they need to never take it out. Some guy could ask for a photo of "Man standing next to car" and now our family member's data will be used to fake some guy up that won't even look close to what a human should look like.

I can't stress this enough, no matter how good the genai gets, it doesn't look like a human to me. Something will always be off or uncanny. Body shapes, face structure, hair, you name it. It can't recreate what makes us unique and human. Sure it will try to give you the best option to please you, but even then, like I said, even the smiles on thier faces looked wrong. It hurt a lot to see these fake people that don't exist cosplay poorly as my dead family.

That's why I'm against this tech. I used to not be. When genai was first a thing, it was a novelty, it used hardly any energy, and it made some silly shit. It was harmless. But I watched it mutate fast into what it is now. Every fucking company is trying to push it in some way. They pray upon your sadness, your loneliness, all for some fucking data or maybe a few bucks. It's a theft machine, and now I finally got to witness it stealing the likeness of people I care about and, I can't stress this enough, pumping out a poorly rendered version of who they are. It hurts to see my own family fall for this.

I won't even begin to rant about the other theft it does. How many artists out there are fighting so hard to have thier work not trained on these things? How many websites have been shitified due to vibe coding at this point? How much coding was stolen from open source projects without permission? It's a pretty high number. They want to scrape any data they can.

I wish someone in my family reached out to me again, asked me just one more time if this should be a thing we should try. Then I could say "No, don't do that. Don't break my heart like this. It's not worth it." It's too late now. And now my family's faces are more than likely going to be used in a dataset of other faces to generate some slop that some person halfway across the world will use to try to sell a burrito somewhere. With that phony uncanny smile that I will never unsee.

You can never sell me on the positives of this technology ever again. I was already pretty heavily against genai, but now, fuck you for lying to my family and using thier grief against them.

I hope the genai industry rots.