Clever people are using computer programs to produce fake humans, say how great they are, and push them for money. They are designed to be sexually suggestive or work on other human desires for self-gratification, including that of child abuse, because that is how money can be made.
There can be beauty in a picture, partly through the implied care a person took to capture or produce it. Beauty is not skin deep, and seduction is not beauty – more so when it implies an acceptable path to corruption. It uses a shallow image of reality to fool us. We are being asked, by the tech industry, to become very shallow. We don’t have to comply.
As a child, I grew up in a rural coastal region, where the town’s streetlights were switched off at 11 pm each night. Some nearby areas had no electrical power at all, and the nearest city was 100 miles away. At night, the Milky Way was just that, stretching across the sky, with the Magellanic Clouds clearly visible half the year and Scorpio, Orion, and the Southern Cross part of normal life.
As street lighting improved, this faded a little, but remained bright and clear, and was unchanged from the hills and farms around. The creek had platypus and blackfish. There were 10 miles of empty sand beach on the coast to the southwest, broken only by a clear water entrance, and the mountains of the promontory to the south backing the wide inlet and islands where mutton birds returned from a yearlong circumference of the Pacific.
This is the stunning reality that humans have lived in, in various forms in various parts of Earth, for a hundred thousand years. Watching the vastness of the universe domed above and a land and seascape fading toward a distant vague horizon must inevitably change the way we view the world and each other. The beauty of the spheres.
Hellbound and Down 