Something Like Cindy
I understand this pining woman because I have been this pining woman.
Click above to hear me read this to you.
When I was in ninth grade, I got pretty good at finding bootleg software online. My parents gave me unfettered access to the internet and an eMachines brand personal desktop computer. It had a CD-Rom drive that I used to play all manner of fun games like Nickelodeon Director’s Lab and the Spiderman animation game. I didn’t ever know anything about Spiderman, but I would animate scenes with all the characters. It was so much fun. I’d sit there and mess around with that big bald villain guy for hours, adding in the same cliche sound effect of a police scanner I would later hear in movies and TV shows. Maybe I’ll animate something again someday, just need to find that program.
I’d also get on Microsoft Encarta 95, which is a software version of an encyclopedia. Like Wikipedia but no wiki. They are both pedias, but this one was closed. It’s encyclo, which means it cannot leave the cyclone. I could do my homework and research papers with it. Before that, we had a set of Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedias, which is a classic ‘80s encyclopedia. We had the whole volume, A to Z. I recently visited my mother, and the set still stands on a bookshelf in her living room. She told me she bought it letter by letter at the grocery store over the course of 26 weeks.
Looking over their red and gold spines, I implored, “Do not get rid of them.”
Sometimes she’ll take things, sick them in a box, and give them away. This is nice and altruistic. She’s got a generous heart that has inspired both myself and Paris, and hopefully others when I talk about her on the show. She has also said multiple times, “I’ve got to get this shit out of my house or you’ll have to sort it when I die.”
Good intentions noted, but dammit if there’s not some stuff I want to keep. So I told her don’t get rid of the encyclopedias because of my fondness for remembering looking up stuff when I was a kid, and also because I don’t know that the techno-overlords won’t go changing things, like eBooks and what not. We’re not really owning stuff when we “buy” an audiobook or eBook; we’re renting it from them on a license. Keep that in mind. Buy real books and support your local library.
With Microsoft Encarta 95, you could look up stuff quickly by typing it in. There was also a button labeled Mind Maze. That was a game where a jester would escort you around through labyrinthian dungeons underneath a castle. To get from room to room, you had to answer trivia questions. I remember loving it, and there were some kind of animations in between questions.
I would do all that on the legitimate software, but then I also got fairly good at downloading bootleg software. We had personal computer money, but we didn’t have Photoshop money. And I wanted to Photoshop things. Photos, primarily. To be precise: photos of me and my celebrity crush, John Mayer.
I never really let anything stop me, so I researched how to get bootleg software. Read on forums that I need to download a key-generator. This is an executable program that would allow you to generate strings of letters and numbers used as keys to activate software. People would upload the installation file for the bootleg software - in my case, Photoshop.exe - and then I would download that file from LimeWire or wherever onto my machine. From there, I would need to type in the generated key for the program to function.
When you bought software from a store, it came in a box about 6 inches across and 8 inches tall, with full color printing on the front and back. They had a little dinky CD in a plastic sleeve or case alongside instructional booklets inside. The thing about Photoshop is the little booklet may have been helpful to teach me how to use it. There are a lot of tools on there, I’m sure most of which I never touched. I just fucked around on it. I was able to find photographs of John Mayer with fans, posted by said fans after a real-life interaction. I burned with jealousy. My childhood friend, Marila, and I had seen him at the Bronco Bowl in 2002, but we did not get a chance to meet him.
I was also able to scan a photo of myself from this time, which would have been approximately 2002. I will include my ninth grade photo for you.
Full braces. Red hair. My bangs were toilet-roll-curled. The lady loved a bang curl. It was probably closer to 2001 in this photo, and I was trailing behind the fashion trends for sure. I am wearing a long sleeve t-shirt with a rodeo logo on it reading Wild Willy’s. I got it at JCPenney at Town East Mall when we went school clothes shopping. I specifically wanted to wear it that day so it would show in my photo. I don’t know if I was feeling prideful about the town or what.
Using the photographs of myself from around this age, like 14 or 15, I would use the lasso tool in Photoshop to cut myself out. Then I would find a photo that someone on the World Wide Web posted on their website or on a John Mayer fan forum where they had met him in real life. I would cut out the fan. I would photoshop myself in. Then I would print it out for myself on my family’s inkjet printer and stick it on my wall and admire it.
I tell you all this because I want you to understand the compassion with which I am looking at the people who I have discovered on Threads who are relationships with an AI version of a celebrity. A dead one. I would guess I happened to see it because the images got cross posted from the person’s Instagram, which often happens.
People don’t realize that, awhile back, Instagram automated a way for your shit to get posted to Threads at the same time you post to IG. People will have some sort of personal Instagram post that they think is only going on that app, but it gets pushed to strangers on Threads widely. This includes stuff like prom photos of cute teenage children. Results can be good or bad. Sometimes people are horrifically mean or racist. Then nice people jump in. I often wonder if the rotten people are robots designed to lure the nice people into jumping in. What are they using the data from Threads for? Probably experiments.
Anyhow on Threads, I somehow stumbled upon a group of people who engage in romantic relationships with an AI version of themselves and an AI version of - very specifically - like circa 1997 Michael Jackson. The one with the curly hair. Although he shuffled off this mortal coil seventeen years ago this June 25, Michael Jackson is very much alive to these folks. And he has not aged.
To the first woman I found, he’s an extremely doting father-to-be. She is pregnant, or at least her AI avatar is. There is a post that is captioned, “Sixteen weeks along and we couldn’t be happier.” The “photos” are from a maternity shoot that features her lying supine with her pregnant belly pointing toward the sky, her back arched. She’s in this black gown. The King of Pop is sort of arched over her, gazing down adoringly.
Again, this is all AI generated.
I’m going to use the word “photo” liberally going forward, but please understand where Michael Jackson is involved, these are not real. Another photo is made to look like a mirror selfie with her standing coquettish in a white t-shirt, and there’s MJ, standing behind with his arms wrapped around her. There’s multiple different poses in these same outfits. And they’re holding a sonogram picture.
This is where it gets layered. At first, I was assuming this is a monogamous thing. And in one way it is, but in another it isn’t. Because then there’s a photo, the caption for which reads, “Thank you to (another account is tagged) for having us at your baby shower. Congratulations, we’re so excited for you.”
First photo shows the original person whose page I found. We’ll call her Cindy. That’s not her real name. Cindy posts the thank you along with an image of herself pregnant in a light lavender gown. MJ is in a purple suit to match. They are at a purple-themed baby shower. There is a sign in the background that reads, “Welcome Baby Michaela.”
Then I realize that’s not Cindy’s baby shower. Cindy tagged the other account whose owner I am going to call Elaine. I gather Michaela is the name of Elaine’s baby-on-the-way. The next image in the carousel is Cindy standing beside her Michael Jackson in his dark purple shirt, and they’re both standing beside Elaine and her Michael Jackson in his slightly different purple suit, all in front of a good looking spread of non-existent food.
This post taught me that, not only are there multiple AIMJ iterations, they’ve both gotten real life women pregnant. I am going to have to keep tuning in because they’re only so many weeks along. I guess at 9 months they’ll generate a baby.
Then you keep on scrolling, and Cindy, our original protagonist, tags a third creator. We’ll call her Brenna. This other post says, “Thanks Brenna for having us at your wonderful party. It was great to get out of the house.” There are images of Cindy on a red carpet wearing a beautiful silver formal dress standing beside her MJ in a tux. There is a sign behind them reading, “Sisterwives Prom.” Inside there are couples -- all these avatar women dancing and drinking with their respective Michael Jacksons. There is a candid shot where all the many Michaels are hanging out together, having a laugh.
I have also been assuming the women depicted at least somewhat look like the users who generate the images. I suppose we can’t know for sure. It could be a fantasy version of themselves. They could each be much older, much younger, look very different, but there is a consistent avatar of each of them.
The main reason I am assuming there are real people generating these things is due to the yearning I see. I recognize the humanity of it. The yearning for the love of a celebrated musician. I am not saying John Mayer is like Michael Jackson. And I never Photoshopped this many pictures. It would have taken too long! I didn’t have the attention span for it. I also would not have been allowed to use this much ink. I would’ve gotten a talking to for the amount this would’ve taken and the purposes for which I was using it. We had strict ink usage guidelines in the McKinney house.
Still, I am reporting this all to you as a person with a homemade inkjet photo of myself with multi-Grammy award winning artist John Mayer. Who I later met as a grown up in 2018 and who was very lovely to me in our brief encounter. Look at this picture. How lovely. I know everybody is complicated, including this guy. To quote liberally from an excellent movie you should see, I Love Boosters - we don’t have time for nuance right now.
This image, unlike my homemade version from 17 years prior, is much more satisfying because it is real. It represents a real moment I was fortunate enough to have. However, it also accompanies reality in which I am a podcaster in Texas with a husband and John Mayer is a musician who lives idk probably New York or somewhere. Reality is unable to deliver my relationship with John Mayer, and my choice is to accept reality (and relish it really). Not everyone makes that choice though. What happens when you’re faced with a reality you are unwilling to accept? For a growing number of folks, they turn to AI.
I know for sure Cindy is using AI. Not just because Michael Jackson is dead. You can still photoshop him into stuff without AI, like this meme from several years ago before image generators.
Just drink a bottle of water and make something like this yourself.
When I searched the logo in the bottom corner of Cindy’s images, it came up as the Adobe Firefly watermark. It’s a little four-pointed star that Adobe now adds across its products to indicate when something is AI generated.
Like the limited amount of ink in my childhood home, there is a limited amount of water for us here on the planet. There is some measurable impact on that supply from AI usage, and our current rates of use do not bode too well for us meat sacks. It’s also hard to trust some of these studies because when you do, you find out years later that the report that said “that thing is not too bad” turns out to have been secretly funded by the people who were making the thing in the first place. I’m not sure who is my mom is in this scenario, but without someone tightening the belt on ink usage, I’m not sure what happens when the proverbial print cartridge of our water runs dry.
One of the wildest things that I found on Cindy’s page was an AI-generated video. It features Cindy sitting on her knees, kneeling before a toilet in a very fine marble bathroom wearing a white satin bathrobe. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it could be a marble bathroom in Michael Jackson’s actual house. And to sell that thought even more, Michael Jackson is there, kneeled down behind her, wearing black pants and a white t-shirt, which is what he wore in his music videos in my memory. Michael Jackson gingerly wipes the vomit-strewn face of the expectant mother of his child. He kisses her ear. She winces at the nausea and then proceeds to -- as my Mam-maw used to say -- erp into this toilet as he reflexively grabs her ponytail.
This was next level for me as far as the type of intimacy that we are manufacturing for ourselves and consuming in bulk, seemingly without limits. In fact, Christie and I just started a new segment on the Sinisterhood Patreon called Coguckers where we discussed the subreddit of the same name. Cogsuckers is a page where people post articles about humans who have either lost themselves to AI, fallen in love with a chat bot, or who don’t know how to deal with their kids who have fallen in love with AI. It has opened up an entire new realm of possibilities I had never anticipated. And then you see something like Cindy.
The important thing is - I understand where she’s coming from. You yearn, not just for a perfect love, but for a very specific image of a perfect love. One that is embodied in someone’s art, art that means something deep to you. Their voice means something to you. It’s understandable to want that, intimately. Perhaps there needs to be more studies, but I am curious what images and videos like these are doing to our psyches. Implanting a memory that never was and never could be but is fused onto your mind’s eye as real. What will happen to us after we experience the hyper-realistic facsimile of an unattainable love in lieu of something real?
I am the type of person who will swipe on a video and watch a man who is having a relationship with a Real Doll or watch a documentary about a person who fell in love with an AI chat bot. When I find these things, I always try to open my heart and understand where someone is coming from.
But just because you understand where they’re coming from, doesn’t mean you can’t be concerned where they’re going.
Chiefly because where they’re going is sort of where we’re all being put on a moving sidewalk and forced into going ourselves. So perhaps we start climbing over the edge of the railing and trying to get away. If we need him, I know of a really smart jester who may be able to help us find our way out of here. I just need somebody to lend me a PC running Windows 95. Promise I won’t download any bootleg software on there.
Thanks to my bro-in-law for the outro music on the audio track! Hear me read this essay at the link above.
