Recently Mark Zuckerberg, the tech mogul who allows us to have thousands of friends that we’ve never met, opined that the average person has 3 friends. He also thinks that person wants 15 friends. I probably did have 3 friends, but I’m at the age where they keep dying on me. Now, if you count my wife as a friend, I’m down to one. At least as long as I keep making coffee and emptying the dishwasher now and again.
So maybe I should investigate this whole idea of AI friends. Being an old-school Boomer, I want to actually see the person I’m to be friends with. Being a new-school tech junky, I decided to ask each of several AI image generators for a self-portrait. These were done on an iPad using the Glow AI - AI Chat Assistant from Glow Labs. Each image was done using the Image Generator function of the app. I tried each of the 4 services provided in the app, using the Photographic style. Here’s what they came up with.
Flux
This looks like anime, not a photograph. There may be a bug in the app that caused this, so I tried again using Futurism as the style.
This is a little more lifelike, but in truth both of these are as young or younger than my grandchildren. Being friends with either one would seem pretty creepy!
GPT-40
Turning the request around back at me was an unexpected twist. The woman doesn’t seem especially friendly, perhaps because the magic of AI allowed her to see the geezer making the request.
Stable Diffusion
I have a grandson about this age. He’s a great kid, but would not be that excited about hanging out with an old man. I doubt that I have much in common with this guy.
DALL-E
I probably shouldn’t be surprised by the ages of the images that AI came up with as self-portraits. It is a new technology, so the age of the images probably reflects that.
In Summary
Given my introverted nature, I can’t see myself having coffee with any of these “friends” that I supposedly need. When it’s my turn to shuffle off the planet I don’t think any of these folks will miss me. Maybe I’ll get some friends like these:
