Intertwixt 9: Who Am I?

For this week, I’ll be stream of consciousness for a bit. And then…not. Have a drink and unwind. It’s the weekend. Decompress.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been entertaining my friends with little videos of me doing stuff. Being the New York Jets coach. Performing magic tricks. Talking to the Queen. They’re not real. They’re not me.

I mean, they are real. They’re real videos. Made by AI. Using scans of my face on the Sora app made by OpenAI. I thought it would hopefully be obvious that they were AI generated. But that’s not the case. At least a few people I know thought my video with the Jets and me performing magic might be real. They were sad. And angry. I get it.

But also weird: many people have congratulated me on my videos. Said they were great, or funny. Or the best thing they’d seen. See, I had nothing to do with them. I entered a text prompt. AI did the rest. That’s an improv performance by someone else with my mask on. Why congratulate me at all?

***

A colleague told me my Google News author profile was strange. It said my author name in Korean - or, something in what I think is Korean. When I click on the author link, nothing comes up. It’s a bug in the system. Whose system? Mine, or Google’s, or all of the above?

This also happened months ago - Google listed me as Zak Stein. Google’s Knowledge Graph had me wrong. I found a real Zak Stein and emailed him to ask if he had problems, too. He said he was fine. 

I emailed Google’s help form and filed a complaint. I don’t know what happened, but the Zak Stein problem disappeared…and so did my summary Knowledge Graph. Now I have nothing. And now my author name is in Korean.

***

It’s funny. Life is funny. Identities are funny. Life is scary. Life is melting.

I’ve written about my own sense of fragmented identity. It’s kind of an obsession of mine. Both Scott Stein’s First Play and Scott Stein’s Last Play, plays written in 1999 and 2023, were bookend echoes of the struggle.

In both, Scott Stein gets mirrored, distorted, erased, reborn. In the newer play, generative AI gets me wrong. And replicates me, summarizes me, apologizes and conflates again.

That is happening for real. All around. In smaller scattered ways. I am casting pieces of myself to the void, and the void is screwing up the details. Who am I? Do I even want to know?

My identity feels both in and out of my hands. As the internet, all of tech, government, life itself, feels both in and out of my hands. Amazon server outages feel like stark reminders of the need to not place faith in big companies to handle our needs via cloud structures that aren’t in our direct control, but even that panic attack feeling is an undercurrent of a larger more sand-shifting feeling…that we all rely on each other, anyway, every moment, to make our world. And our sense of reality.

Also, probably, who I am. It’s constructed out of what exists of me as much as what I give it to construct.

When AI decides to eventually mold a holographic clay model of me years and years and decades and decades from now, will it know to only absorb the right pieces? The factual ones? Or will it absorb the deepfakes, intentional and otherwise, the hallucinations, the reconstructions, the multiverse fragments? Will that reanimated AI me of the far future be a hologram half-real, half-true? Or do our memories already do this, in a way, already? What are my memories of my dad? How was he really? I can’t see in the real world anymore, breathing, in front of me. How do I remember anything.

***

In the present moment, I’m also scanning my face very realistically into an Apple Vision Pro headset. My Persona, once made, looks like me. It’s uncanny, too. But I use it to call my wife on FaceTime. She laughs. It’s so strange. I look so sad. My eyes are wrong. It was the way I did the scan, I think. 

But I’m controlling the virtual me. 

Right, so it’s different?

Skip-jumping to the Week That Was, I’ve spent a ton of time looking at a lot of headsets. The Apple Vision Pro has an M5 processor now, and a new head strap. And there’s the Samsung Galaxy XR, the first Android XR product by Google and Samsung that’s a harbinger of smart glasses coming next year using Gemini to see the world…and, maybe, your phone, and everything else.

Meta Ray-Ban Displays, Apple Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR. These are products in evolution, forms to a future ideal that hasn’t been ironed out yet. What we had in VR before – affordable game consoles, like Meta Quest – those days feel done, although the Quest is still very much here, and very much the best VR headset for its price.

Each of these devices has glimmers. Meta’s glasses design, that neural band magic, the clear display tech. Apple’s amazing AV and design flair in-headset, the ease with which it juggles multiple screens, the wild possibilities of those realistic Personas. Google and Samsung’s open approach to future products, Gemini Live’s ability to see the real world and XR apps simultaneously, and all the Google services that could live in that universe, between phones, watches, glasses, rings.

I keep slipping them on and off, this last week, comparing, thinking…and taking breaks from all the screens, too. It’s a lot. Like a lot a lot.

I feel like I’ve been force-fed the ambitious future in one manic month, all of it into my two eyes. And there’s more to come. Two of these devices are very new, and the Vision Pro’s new set of accessories and better chip could open up apps and AI.

There’s only one me. And there are all these worlds. We will need to have synergy between multiple universes and metaverses and ecosystems, or be forced to live a life bonded to one set of peripherals. Big tech is trying to envelop us in their interfaces, head to toe. Which will we choose, if any? How will we manage ourselves and our identities in them? Where does one meet the other?

Or, I guess, there are many mes. Ask Sora, which has multiplied me into AI puppets. That’s just the beginning. It makes me want to throw a blanket over myself sometimes, take a breath, and just stare into the far distance that I can’t see through my walls.

Work I did this week:

See you next time.