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.
Earlier this summer, running breathless on the rugged shores of the Pacific on the Oregon coast, I was caught flat-footed by a ghost. It was my father, standing on a bluff, binoculars clasped to his face, looking out to sea. The plaid shirt, the khaki hiking pants, the brown hiking boots, even the dumb floppy hat, all checked out. But then, I ran closer, and of course it wasn’t him, it was a generic old beardy guy with binoculars, someone else’s father, perhaps.
Grief is strange that way. Every once in a while, you’re tripped up on a street corner, winded by a reflection, because just for a second, it seems that one of the departed has returned. The person you lost is found.
In the weeks before my dad died from prostate cancer, he decided he’d like to be interred at a woodland burial site. He visited one and declared it nice enough, but died before any arrangements could be made.
Dad had converted to Islam a few years before his death. And so my brother, tasked with making the final arrangements on a tight deadline, recounted to me the slightly surreal scene the morning after Dad died, of standing in a small forest in the English countryside talking on his flip phone to a man on a smartphone, with a Qibla-finding app. While my brother and the man on the other end of the phone tried to triangulate an available plot that faced Mecca, workers at the burial site expressed concern as to whether the cloth used to wrap Dad’s body would be fully biodegradable.
I wasn’t there for the last weeks of Dad’s life, for the plot finding, nor for the funeral. I was grounded by the very late stages of pregnancy and then the birth and earliest days with my daughter, his first grandchild. Dad was buried at the foot of a slightly wonky beech tree in Beaconsfield, England, while I was at a breastfeeding support group in New York City. We didn’t do virtual funerals in 2010.
After I saw the janky A.I. image of my dad, I emailed Farhad, to see if he knew its origin. He figured he’d got it from a Reddit forum but couldn’t recall the exact link. I did a reverse image search and found the image is circulating all over the place. As far as I can tell, it was first posted by a charming account under the handle “ViperEnforcement” on a meme forum called America’s Best Pics and Videos. The comments beneath that first post laud the men in the picture for their service, calling them the true patriots, thanking them for our freedom.
I (like most of us) am not in possession of an advanced A.I. forensics degree. “Reverse image search” is pretty much the peak of my technical sleuthing skill set on this one. It’s not something you can FOIA, so the best I can muster is speculation as to the image’s provenance. I’m guessing an image generator scraped a photo of my dad from somewhere online (maybe the wedding pictures I posted in 2007?) and then didn’t jumble it up enough to make it into someone new. Instead, it issued forth an eerie facsimile.
This isn’t, however, a bereaved double take. It’s not an old beardy man on a bluff. It’s a double that’s been taken, that has been dredged from Dad’s years-old digital shadow and repurposed to adorn MAGA forums, to be reposted by Facebook patriots and used for fundraising, even for a puzzle.
We have given the keys to our once-private analog existences over to the wealthiest companies in human history. Our memories have become forever digital debris to be sucked in, digested, and reanimated by machine learners. Our lives, our dead, and their data are becoming a kind of digital compost. Maybe it’s a bit like a woodland burial?
Well, except no, it’s not anything like that. We are not vegetable scraps, and no trees will grow from my father’s online remains. The ways in which our information is now totally beyond our control make all of us queasy or, if we think about it a little longer, angry. But it’s an impotent anger. There’s nowhere to put it. It’s futile.
We used to try to do something about it. Kind of. Remember those Facebook posts that were so common, oh, maybe 10 years ago? About “Repost this to tell Facebook you withdraw consent for your images being used”? They were pointless then, but we don’t even try any more (well, maybe your aunty is still doing it). Half the time these days I click “accept all cookies” when faced with the question. What’s the point? The cat is out of the bag. The big unknown “they” already know everything about me.
My father used to say to me, “It’s a wise child that knows its own father.” His version of a dad joke meant, I think, to jauntily suggest that I wasn’t his? He was that kind of man, a man I knew and didn’t. He only became more so after death.
Our place and our rights in this new world of artificial neural networks lie beyond certainty, inflected with the unknowable. We are not wise. We do not know where it all comes from. I can’t even prove this picture of my dad is a picture of my dad. There are some minor differences, like the line of the beard, the shape of the glasses—but when I texted the picture to my brothers, each responded, “WTAF,” or words to that effect. This is unmistakably him.
And at the same time, I’m pretty sure that’s not enough evidence to sue anyone, if there even is anyone to sue. Is there anyone to sue? To whom should I address the cease and desist?
Could the act of writing this story provide some small redress? I could paste the link to it below the posts in all the online groups, forums, and X retweets (or whatever Elon says we have to call those now). I could correct the record: Hey! There’s a real dead person in this fake photo!
I could take back the narrative. I could tell them he wasn’t an American veteran at all—he was Canadian, and he was actually pretty rabidly anti-American, an oil engineer–turned–environmentalist, a serial philanderer. I could tell them his darkest secret, that he was a sexual abuser. A child molester. I could tell of the pain and suffering, the trail of destruction he left behind. The unanswered and unanswerable questions. I could tell them he wasn’t a hero, he was my deeply flawed father. A father I loved very much, and love still, in incredibly complicated ways—ways simplified somewhat, admittedly, by his being dead. Ways complicated all over again by his artificial resurrection and reappearance on my timeline.
I could tell them all that, but who am I kidding? Like anyone cares. You see? Futile.
I’m familiar with futile anger, an abundance of fury with no one to point it at. The extent of the abuse my father perpetrated was not revealed to me until a little over a year after he was washed, wrapped, and put snug in the ground at the foot of that beech tree.
But then what to do with this photographic phantom, this nonconsensual technological transgression? I know that it is nothing on the scale of the horror experienced by (mostly) women whose likenesses have been repurposed into porn, or of people whose identities have been stolen, or people who have been catfished, defrauded, duped by A.I.-generated images and video. This is not a deepfake that will take down democracy. This image has not harmed me. Stumbling upon it among all the crap that flickers before my eyes in the black mirror was just some everyday, humdrum trauma: an image of an all-too-common family ghost, haunting me as I rage against the unreachable. The person I lost can no longer be found. In the end, it’s just a weird picture of my dead dad.
