Lately I’ve been appearing in public as someone other than myself. Last weekend I played both haute couture model and Matilda Sager Delaney. Soon I’ll don a new disguise as one of the “residents” of Mountain View Cemetery for their upcoming spring tour (June 3rd).
Cemetery tour disguise: who IS she? Find out on June 3 . . .
The week after that I’m in an adult tap quartet. We are on the program for Dance Center of Walla Walla’s spring recital. I might appear on the Cordiner Hall stage disguised in this fashion:
Possible disguise for dance recital, coming June 11!
You could be like a normal person and say costume instead of disguise.
Yeah, it’s not like you’re going to wear a fake beard and mustache- -are you?
Not so far, 9, but that’s happened before and it could happen again.
To address your remark, Lily, about saying disguise instead of costume, maybe in my subconscious I’m thinking about artificial intelligence, or AI. This week I read an article (New York Times, Modern Love column, “Uh-Oh, I Seem to Be Dating a Chatbot”) about an online dating service that set up the author of the article with a “match” generated by AI. The article was sent by a friend who occasionally ribs me about ChatGPT, an invention that, in my opinion, is anathema for authors. If you are fortunate enough to not know what ChatGPT is, here’s a brief explanation from an unidentified online source:
“ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that uses natural language processing to create humanlike conversational dialogue. The language model can respond to questions and compose various written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code and emails.”
Huh?
Like a robot but only the thought process, not the physical object.
I repeat: Huh?
One type of content ChatGPT can create (in addition to poor-quality fiction and your procrastinating kid’s book report) is a romantic “match” based on a real person’s online dating profile.
The author of the “Modern Love” piece knew she was dealing with an AI suitor from the start but wanted to see how far it would go. She made a date to meet up with him/it at a popular bar, curious to see who or what arrived. AI Guy was a no-show. She sent an email asking if she’d got the day or time wrong, etc. Eventually he/it confessed that he did not have a physical body and that meeting her in person was not possible.
What a phony!
Exactly, Lily. As I expressed to the friend who sent the article, in a dating application there seems to be little difference between AI and a highly gifted psychopathic liar.
.
In other words, it’s hard enough to see through the human variety of highly gifted psychopathic liar. Why do we need artificial ones, too?
