Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 06/03/2025 at
08:27AM eastern, and we have a considered show for you this
week. In our second ever episode length segment, Hans confronts
the technological, moral, and philosophical impacts of using
artificial intelligence to animate still photos, including
those of both personal and historical significance. It's an
incredible, and as you've come to expect from Hans, incredibly
thoughtful piece, and I'm very excited for you to hear it.
And also pet sounds. But right now, we're gonna take a quick
break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the
member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of
the things that have happened since the last time you heard
from us. Hold on to your butts.
I've got five stories for you this week. Academics left
Twitter for Blue Sky along with a lot of other people, but a new
study out of Zurich and The UK looks at academics specifically
asking why did those who switched make the switch. The
researchers call Blue Sky a, quote, rare natural experiment
for studying large scale migration from a long stable
platform, end quote, and find that, quote, the transition
behavior of accounts a user follows, followees, exerts
substantially stronger influence than the behavior of their
followers. In other words, academics and maybe people in
general, but who knows, follow information sources over access
to audiences when deciding to switch platforms. Researchers
also found that shock events, as they call them, account for huge
bumps in transition from one platform to another.
These are things like x instituting fees, the public
launch of Blue Sky when invite codes were no longer needed,
Brazil blocking x, and the biggest by far, the result of
the most recent US election. Speaking of x, CommunityNotes'
most prolific contributor is a cybersecurity startup. According
to Web three Antivirus founder Alex Dulube, the company
apparently uses a combination of machine learning and automation
tools to provide additional context in the community notes
section of x posts that forward crypto scams, which scam sniffer
estimates cost x users nearly $47,000,000 in March of this
year. Nancy Mace, the toilets obsessed Republican
congresswoman from South Carolina has apparently
commanded bot armies as well as her own staffers at the helm of
burners and sock puppets to counter criticism of her online.
This according to Wired.
We had to make multiple accounts, burner accounts, and
go and reply to comments saying that things weren't true even on
Reddit forums, a former staffer told Wired. We were
congressional staff and there were actual things we could be
doing to help the constituents. Mace, the staffers report,
describes herself as a self taught coder. RFK junior, the
brainworm having ist cabinet head secretary of the department
of health and human services, oversees the CDC, FDA, and so on
released his make our children healthy again report as part of
his so called make America healthy again commission, and it
contains citations for research which does not exist, likely
hallucinated by an LLM used to generate the report. According
to NODIS, at least seven of the studies cited in the report do
not exist, leading research scientists cited to clarify that
the work attributed to them is not real.
Other nonexistent studies are attributed to nonexistent
authors. And finally, Roblox grow a garden game hit 8,700,000
concurrent users at the end of last month. The game is a kind
of farming sim reminiscent of Animal Crossing in that the
landscape persists and changes while the player is away. Grow a
garden offers in game purchases for resources useful in the
tending of the farm, which Bloomberg reports have made
their way off platform, selling for inflated prices at various
digital goods marketplaces. Players of the game, which
accounts for nearly 30% of Roblox total activity at the
moment, spend millions of dollars a week buying secondhand
digital items according to marketplace site Eldorado.GG
founder, Vladis Jorkevicius.
According to Roblox terms of service, however, this is not
allowed. The company has yet to step in. That is the news I have
for you this week in this week's episode, Hans, on using
artificial intelligence to animate the past and the
feelings that inspires. But first, in our interstitials this
week, pet sounds.
Hans Buetow: Literally. Quick notice that this segment
contains discussions of war, execution, and murder.
City Council Member: Alright. Good evening and welcome to the
City of Falcon Heights City Council meeting on Wednesday,
03/26/2025. We'll call this meeting to order at 07:03PM.
Hans Buetow: Just a couple of months ago, my wife and I
attended our first ever city council meeting for our small
town. We were there along with about probably 80 other citizens
because on the agenda that night was the debate on public versus
paid street parking for the Minnesota State Fair. And unlike
most of the food at the fair, it was a pretty spicy night, which
started with the head of our local public access TV, Jeff
Ongstad, doing an annual report.
Jeff Ongstad: I had no idea there was this much interest in
community television. In 2025 and beyond, we anticipate
another 25% increase in all community coverage long form and
short form.
Hans Buetow: I love community services like this. So I was
pretty stoked to hear about covering local high school
sports and doing video for city council meetings.
Jeff Ongstad: We're also having a larger presence at community
events. So if you have events where we can have a table or a
tent or something, we'd like to be there, show some of our
stuff. We're buying a TV that you can play outside. So we're
excited about that.
Hans Buetow: And then towards the end of his presentation,
things suddenly changed.
Jeff Ongstad: And I'd like to show you just a little example.
We're embracing AI assisted production to enhance
capabilities we have along with speeding up our workflow.
Hans Buetow: Let's just pause here real quick. I want to
explain what I'm looking at in this moment. On the screen
behind Jeff Ongstad is a photograph that he's showing of
a group of three adult men and a dozen boys who look probably, I
don't know, 10 years old. They're all in a parking lot.
You can see the tail fin of a nineteen fifties car off to the
right.
The boys are looking in every direction, mostly at each other.
A few of them are looking at the camera, and, of course, one kid
in the back is blowing a raspberry.
Jeff Ongstad: Just one area that we're using is is like in old
photographs and stuff to animate those.
Hans Buetow: As he says this
Jeff Ongstad: So we can take old photos like this and not only
clean them up, but then bring them to life.
Hans Buetow: Everyone in the picture starts to move.
Jeff Ongstad: And that's just from an old photograph.
Hans Buetow: Like, literally, they all just start looking at
each other. Most start smiling. A few of them, like, mouth words
to each other. One kid bends down. The other kids all look at
him while he does that.
Even the trees in the background start to blow lightly in the
breezes. My first thought, this is cool. Followed by a strong
desire to do this with photos of my family, I am my generation's
keeper of the family history and object. So I have boxes, photos
going back several generations, which I've cataloged, I've
digitized, and I could put into AI a photo of my great
grandfather who I'm named after, but who died before I was born.
And this man who I never met would smile at me.
And I immediately think of our friend contributing producer
Tori Dominguez Peek, who last year filed a story for us about
companies who are trying to get her to make AI representations
of her dead mom for Mother's Day. And Tori's piece focused on
what feels like to reanimate your dead family members with
AI. And even though she's confident that she doesn't want
to do that, she doesn't want to build an AI version of her mom,
I'm not so sure.
Errol Morris: What I like about photographs is that they're
wormholes into history.
Hans Buetow: This is the director Errol Morris, and he's
doing an interview about his incredible book, believing is
seeing, which is all about the idea of truth and photography.
Errol Morris: What if I could walk into the picture itself,
look around, and ask myself, what am I really looking at?
What is really there? What is the reality that this photograph
is in part recording? It's the mystery of what we're looking
at. The mystery of what is it.
Hans Buetow: His is a very human inclination, one that has fueled
archaeology, genealogy, history, all kinds of science, like the
team who scanned the larynx of a 3,000 year old mummy so that
they could synthesize its voice, and the team that hooked up an
air compressor to the splayed open respiratory system of a
dead lion so they could get it to roar again. Yes. This desire
gives us this sense of connection, especially to those
we can never meet.
Errol Morris: As if somehow we can actually reach out and touch
the past. Right. It seems so close, particularly when it's a
photograph of someone that we have known in life or that is
deeply connected to us, as if somehow time really has been
defeated, which is one of the great dreams. Look, we can
defeat time.
Hans Buetow: This desire makes deep sense to me and feels
different from what's happening with the animations that I'm
seeing when I'm sitting in the city council meeting, which
those feel more risky. But why? Why is that? In Tori's story,
making a new photo of her dead mom herself, that feels like one
thing. Lowercase h history.
But in this room, these photos are of and for our town, and
they feel like they belong to all of us. They're shared
uppercase h history. If we start messing with our uppercase h
history, I think that feels very different, especially when we're
using the hand of AI to do it. After the city council meeting,
I was talking about this with my wife saying, I should probably
try out animating some photos to see what it's like. She
countered with a strong no.
There are just certain things that should not exist, she said.
This isn't a practical issue about could we. This is a moral
issue about should we. I started thinking then about photos that
I don't want AI to try to bring to life. Like what would the
computer imagine comes after Robert Capa's nineteen thirty
six photo, the one of a Spanish soldier whose mid collapse after
being shot in the head?
Or the 1930 photo by Lawrence Beitler of the lynching of
Thomas Ship and Abram Smith with their killers looking on
smiling. I feel like I know what AI would do with those grins,
those bodies. Photo after photo started springing to mind of
things that are shared, important images that document a
piece of our collective history. Over the next couple of weeks, I
started thinking about this technology and the photo that
has burrowed its way most into my memory. This photo is
gruesome or it's about to be gruesome.
Don Carlton: Well, this photograph, which has many
names, by the way, over the years, know, but it's been
generally called the Saigon Execution.
Hans Buetow: This is doctor Don Carlton. Don helped acquire the
estate of Eddie Adams who died in 02/2004. Eddie was the
Associated Press photographer who took the photo, the Saigon
execution, and it's one you've probably seen. Two men in a
street, one with a gun to the head of the other. So Don
specializes in the history of news media and the use of
historical photographs, and I asked him to tell me the story
of this photo.
And in case you hadn't gathered with a title like the Saigon
Execution, this is gonna be about an execution. So if that's
not what you wanna hear about, just skip ahead about three and
a half minutes. Okay. Here we go.
Don Carlton: He took the photograph during the Tet
Offensive, and the Vietnam War, which was in February of
nineteen sixty eight.
Hans Buetow: Eddie Adams was out scouting a story of a nearby
skirmish between police, soldiers, and Viet Cong.
Eddie Adams: Xolon is a Chinese section of Saigon.
Hans Buetow: This is Eddie in an interview with the AP prior to
his death.
Eddie Adams: And we got within a couple of blocks of the area. It
was very quiet. There wasn't any there's no movement. When
there's no movement, no people, you know that something is up.
Don Carlton: He saw when he was going to his car, he happened to
look over and see members of the national police there, the South
Vietnamese national police, leading this accused terrorist
just down the middle of the street. Gunfire was going all
over the place, so there wasn't much traffic. Okay?
Eddie Adams: And they just kept walking up maybe about a hundred
yards to the corner.
Don Carlton: This man, who was unidentified at the time, had
his hands tied behind his back.
Eddie Adams: And they stopped for a minute. I was about five
feet away from the prisoner.
Don Carlton: And the police told him that the man in their
custody was a Viet Cong. He had killed a police officer, one of
their fellow, you know, one of their colleagues in the police
department. So there was a lot of anger.
Eddie Adams: To my left came this guy, I had no idea.
Don Carlton: General Lone, he was their boss, walked up to the
group and he reached for his pistol.
Eddie Adams: He went over and I seen him go for his pistol.
Don Carlton: Eddie was standing there with his camera.
Eddie Adams: It had a 35 millimeter lens and a single
frame camera.
Don Carlton: He had just zero idea about what Long was going
to do.
Eddie Adams: Well, when somebody goes for their pistol, they
normally threaten. But I've taken pictures like that.
Somebody threatening somebody, you know, do this or I'm gonna
shoot you, and nothing ever happens. So I seen him go for
his pistol. As soon as he raised his pistol, I took one frame.
Don Carlton: At the moment, literally, that Lone fired the
shot
Eddie Adams: That was the incident that he shot him.
Don Carlton: Into the alleged terrorist's right temple, almost
point blank.
Eddie Adams: And I didn't I had no idea that he was gonna do
this.
Hans Buetow: The photo shows the two men with general loan in
military fatigues casually looking down his outstretched
arm to a revolver that's in his hand, and that gun is maybe a
few inches away from the head of Windvom Lem, who's a captain for
the Vietcong. Lem is dressed in a plaid shirt. He's got his arms
behind his back, and he's leaning a little bit away from
the general with his body, And he has his eyes closed, and he's
just forming an expression of surprise.
Eddie Adams: According to the US army, they said the bullet was
still in his head when the picture was taken.
Hans Buetow: I think for me, part of the power that has
always been in that and the reason I think about that photo
is because it's the moment right before you know what's gonna
happen and you get to live in this world where it doesn't
happen even though you know it has to happen.
Don Carlton: It's also the millisecond when that man is
still alive probably. If the bullet is in his head, he is
probably still alive. That's his last millisecond.
Hans Buetow: I think there's so much power in that.
Don Carlton: Well, it's a it is an incredibly powerful
photograph.
Eddie Adams: This
Hans Buetow: photograph makes me feel more things than almost any
other photograph in the world. I find it challenging actually to
look at. It makes my heart hurt for both of these men, for the
world that they had to survive in, and for that moment that
brought them together. When I look at this, I stare at Lon's
outstretched arm that's holding the gun and it feels to me like
there's this ray of energy that's between him and his
victim that's connecting them forever. It feels immediate and
eternal.
But it's not beautiful.
Eddie Adams: There's not a great work of art in terms of
photography. Number one, it's a wrong time of day. The light
wasn't right. The composition, it was terrible. But on the
other hand, that was a moment that was, I guess, very
important.
And I still don't believe, you know, I I still don't understand
to this day why it was so important because I've heard so
many different versions of what this picture did, like it helped
end the war in Vietnam.
Hans Buetow: The day after it was taken, the photograph
appeared on front pages of newspapers all around the world.
Don Carlton: I remember vividly when I first saw that
photograph. Houston Post and Houston Chronicle, both of them
featured prominently. And so when I saw it, I was shocked.
God, here is confirmation of the atrocities that are being waged
in this country. It was a repulsion.
Hans Buetow: This repulsion was broadly shared. The Saigon
execution is considered a powerful force in changing
public opinion about the Vietnam War. Eddie Adams won the
Pulitzer Prize, and the act and the people captured in it
changed the world. They changed history. I asked Don about the
AI animating technology, and that was really the reason that
I wanted to talk to him in the first place.
I wanted to know his views on it because of how complicated mine
were. I went looking for some services that do this, and I
found there's there's a few of them, that are out there. And I
found one that has different settings that you can put on it.
And one of the settings is you can, have two people in the
photograph hug. And I thought, what if I put Eddie Adams' photo
in to that algorithm, and instead of shooting him in the
head, the two men hug.
So if you can imagine that, right? Like I feed it in AI,
like how would that change the meaning of the photograph?
Don Carlton: Well, totally, mean, it's not reality any
longer. It's not what the photograph, the original
photograph depicted. So it's a totally new, it's a whole new
image that lacks any kind of realism to it because it's been
altered pretty profoundly when you do something like that. And
it's just AI in the way that you're talking about is going to
change that photograph. It's not going be the same photograph.
Hans Buetow: AI animating services let you do all kinds of
things. You can make people hug or French kiss or just wave and
smile. But I haven't done any of those things to any photo, let
alone the Saigon execution because both I don't want to and
because, frankly, I don't have to. There is video of that
moment because standing next to Eddie Adams that day was a news
camera person. Don't go watch the video if you haven't
already.
It's an execution. It's disturbing, but both Don and I
have watched it, and it feels so different from Eddie Adams'
photo.
Don Carlton: I would argue probably very few people have
seen the film, and if they have, very few remember much about it,
because it's up and gone in a flash.
Hans Buetow: A lot of the iconic capital h history photos have
accompanying moving images. The flag raising in Iwo Jima, the
Hindenburg crash, the liberation from the concentration camps.
Don Carlton: The napalm girl.
Hans Buetow: Napalm girl. Yeah. Which interestingly was also
filmed.
Don Carlton: Yes. That's true.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. But like that photo and Eddie's photo, like
have a life that those films don't and never will.
Don Carlton: No. No. No. No way. No way.
I mean, you can't use a sit there and look at the horror on
those kids faces. You're not gonna see those faces the same
way in a motion picture. It's so fast. I mean, it just but it
lets you sit there and stare into the face of this horror,
and think about it. You can't do that with a film.
Hans Buetow: There's something in the gap between still and
moving images that's helping me to start to understand what
feels so unsettling about those AI images that I first saw in
that city council meeting. Still and moving, they're not
interchangeable, and they affect us differently. They hold
different power, different potential, even different
truths. Since we created moving images in the nineteenth
century, we have always only been able to bridge that gap in
one direction. We take a still shot from the moving, but AI is
now letting us cross that chasm the other way.
After the break, we're going look at that chasm between a
still and a moving image and how bad we are at seeing what's at
the bottom.
Call In: Hey. Hi, Hans.
Hello. This is Kevin Myers. I am a video producer in the Twin
Cities.
It was interesting to get your question about how do I see the
difference between a still image and a moving image.
The difference between a still image and a moving image.
A still image and a moving image.
I have been thinking about the difference between a still image
and a moving image a lot.
Hans Buetow: To answer that for myself, I wanted to start by
getting a compass from my family, my friends, my friends
of friends.
Call In: A still image is like an individual.
It is an old man stooping to pick up his hat.
The inhale. And a moving image is like a family.
It unfolds like a river.
It's the exhale.
Hans Buetow: In some ways, scrutinizing difference between
a still and a moving image is a purely philosophical question.
But in other ways, it's deeply practical. So let's start there,
practically, and then work our way back to the philosophy of
it.
Call In: I associate moving images with sharing a narrative
and still images with needing to invent a narrative myself. I can
add my imagination to it. They're all kind of imagination,
all possibility. They can be interpreted in a million
different ways.
Hans Buetow: Science backs this up. Motion tells our brains
what's important to look at. In our animal brain, motion is much
more likely to be dangerous. It hijacks our attention. It means
that when there's motion in a movie, everyone's eyes are
following along.
A dozen people looking at the same thing altogether. Still
images, they don't tell us where to look so explicitly, at least
not on that, like, animal level. So a dozen people looking at a
painting are all gonna trace different paths with their eyes.
They will fixate less in any individual spot and they'll
shift around more. The synchronicity of moving images
has an impact.
A 2010 study of people watching movies in MRI machines showed
that along with joining up our eye movements, moving images
also synchronize our emotional responses to those images.
Everyone in the theater gasps all at once. No one in the
portrait gallery gasps at the same time, or even sometimes at
all. We generally experience still images as objects of
interpretation and exploration, and moving images as places for
emotion and engagement.
Call In: Sure. Minimal motion blur, but a 20 FPS is still 120
still images, one after the next. I think of all images as
still, that the word image implies stillness.
Hans Buetow: These perceptions of both still and moving images
all hinge on our ability to move through time.
John Berger: The most important thing about paintings themselves
is that their images are silent still.
Hans Buetow: That is John Berger, a legendary theorist
about images, art, reproduction, the observer, and time. Yes.
Moving images are a bunch of still images over time. It's all
an illusion. The movement is manufactured as the still images
collect over time into motion.
But the relationship between images and time is much more
complicated than just that. Here's Berger from his 1972 BBC
special, Ways of Seeing.
John Berger: It's as if the painting, absolutely still,
soundless, becomes a corridor connecting the moment it
represents with a moment at which you are looking at it. And
something travels down that corridor at a speed greater than
light, throwing into question our way of measuring time
itself.
Hans Buetow: Berger's corridor brings us into connection
through time across time. It narrows, it collapses, or it
freezes. As Laura Mulvey says in her book, Death 24 Times a
Second, quote, just as the cinema animates its still
frames, so it brings back to life in perfect fossil form
anyone it has ever recorded, from great star to fleeting
extra. It brings back to life. Back.
Necromancy. Wicked, thrilling, and tied to our dialogue with
death. Which brings us back to AI. AI to me does not feel like
necromancy. AI is creating a monster from scraps of reality.
A version of something that we recognize but really only
sideways that is animated by supernatural black box forces
that can give form to dark shapeless substances but cannot
bring into being the substance itself. Man, how ignorant art
thou in thy pride of wisdom. We think we can harness the
monster, control it, make trivial its consequences as we
channel lightning through stitches and flesh electrifying
the slab that holds a hulking behemoth. We think it will do
our bidding with no reason to have a life of its own. We have
fed our loved ones into the guts of a machine so that we can
watch them dance.
Call In: Still images, I I feel like have stood the test of time
more so maybe because they've been around longer. It can be
more iconic. I think it is much harder to have an iconic moving
image.
Hans Buetow: Time is also built up as provenance. When we stand
in front of an original painting, we marvel at the
content and the craft, but also a physical presence. Seeing
where the artist's brush left the canvas and knowing that your
eyes and their eyes have seen the same atoms. As John Berger
says, we believe in the power and value of the original, the
genuine, the verifiable, as a nearly religious object, not
because of what it shows us, but simply because it has survived
long enough to show it to us. Saigon execution feels like that
and an AI animation of an image feels to me the opposite of
that.
It doesn't feel transportative, but strangely static. It doesn't
feel connected, but rerouted, tangential. John Berger's
corridor in an AI animation only runs for a moment before it hits
the black box of ones and zeros.
Call In: I'm not sure why, but the first image that came to
mind is one that my grandfather took back in 1912. And the photo
is of my grandmother standing close-up in a field of corn
contemplating a corn cob. And I get to put myself kind of in
place of my grandfather and how did he see her in that moment.
We, I think, images. It still, I think, says more about the
person taking the image than about the image itself.
Hans Buetow: All images are subject to perspective. They are
not moments themselves, but windows into them.
Errol Morris: Images, by their very nature, they they rip a
piece out of the fabric of reality. They they take a swatch
out of reality. And in doing so, you you don't get to see above
and below. You don't get to see left and right. You just get to
see what's in the frame.
Hans Buetow: Errol Morris likes to speculate about the elephant
that's just outside the frame, the one that the photographer
chose not to include in their picture of their Florida
vacation. Someone said, move that elephant out of the way,
and then snapped the photo or took the video. Either way,
because of the possible elephant outside of every frame, we are
left only with the choices made by the framer.
John Berger: Paintings lend themselves to easy manipulation.
They can be used to make arguments or points which may be
different, very different from their original meaning. And
because paintings are essentially silent and still,
The most obvious way of manipulating them is by using
movement and sound.
Hans Buetow: John Berger here is talking about putting paintings
on TV. So zooming in on certain elements that will guide and
focus the audience with a new frame. Same thing with AI. By
animating a still image, you can completely change the frame. You
can pan right.
You can pan left. You can have the camera move down the street.
You can theoretically reveal the elephant. But what if there was
no elephant to be revealed?
Call In: There's more information in a moving image
for sure. There's just more context.
Hans Buetow: Beyond the frame is everything else.
John Berger: The meaning of an image can be changed according
to what you see beside it or what comes after it.
Hans Buetow: An old photo is always instantly recognizable as
an old photo. In looking at a lot of AI animations, however,
as soon as they start to move with their perfect frame rates,
their smooth skin, their eerily digital modernity, It puts the
old into a contemporary visual language. The antiquated and
distant becomes relatable and immediate. If you put it into
your feed, it wouldn't really stand out as an old photo. It
would be imbued with the essence of a TikTok.
But really, it would become less jarring to put next to a TikTok.
And when it's more comfortable to ingest, it becomes easier to
digest.
John Berger: What it means, in theory, is that reproduction of
works of art can be used by anybody for their own purposes.
Images can be used like words, we can talk with them.
Reproduction should make it easier to connect our experience
of art directly with other experiences.
Hans Buetow: We take them out of context, they start to say
something new, which can be good, even great sometimes. But
some swords have two edges.
Call In: A still image is, more easily controllable, more easy
to hide the truth, actually.
Hans Buetow: Are AI generated moving images a lie? Sure. But
so are moving images for all the reasons we've discussed framing,
intention, time. And so are all photographs. All of them tell a
limited version of what there is to know.
They are all lies. Or are they? Here's Errol Morris again.
Errol Morris: Well, don't believe that photographs are
either true or false. Never has made any sense to me. True seems
to be linguistic about a relationship of language to the
world, not of a photograph to the world. Also, I believe all
photographs are posed. So if someone tells me that one
photograph is more truthful than another because it was or wasn't
posed, I think that's very very close to nonsense talk.
Hans Buetow: This is a complicated conversation. There
are many smart people who have written and said many things
about this. But for our purposes, I don't think the
truth inherent in either moving or still images really matters
that much. I think about it sort of like Errol does. Like, I
think about one of my favorite TV shows, the reality show Love
Island.
Situation is ridiculous, but the emotions are real.
Call In: Yeah. There's all sorts of things to think about it.
Anyway
Anyways. I think that's all I got for you right now.
Those are my thoughts. Hope that helps.
Thanks again for reaching out. See you soon. Bye bye. Bye.
Hans Buetow: So why does all this matter? The way we
perceive, the way we think about time, the truth inherent in
images, the emotions that they evoke. Why do we care? Well,
it's because the emotions are real. On 11/13/2021, at a
stoplight in Arizona, a man named Chris Pelkey was shot and
killed by another man in a road rage incident.
After a three and a half year trial, the man who shot and
killed him, Gabriel Horcasidis, was convicted of manslaughter.
As first reported by four zero four Media, this trial marked
the first time that testimony from a murder victim was given
at his killer's sentencing, and it was accomplished using AI.
Pellke's sister wrote some copy and created an avatar that
looked and spoke like her dead brother.
Christopher Pelkey Avatar: Picture and my voice profile.
Hans Buetow: There's a brief video of Pelkey, who's an army
veteran, that they used to make the avatar, and then it cuts
back to the avatar who haltingly thanks the judge for all his
hard work. He says his appreciation for everyone who
testified on his behalf, and then he addresses his killer
directly.
Christopher Pelkey Avatar: So I would like to make my own impact
statement to Gabriel Horkasidas, the man who shot me. It is a
shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances.
In another life, we probably could have been friends. I
believe in forgiveness and in God who forgives. I always have,
and I still do.
Hans Buetow: He's not really moving much. Just his mouth is
slightly animated. The audio is clipped at the end of every
sentence with clear AI artifacts, weird inflections,
multiple breaths, strange phrasing, and all of it was
written by his sister. This is weird enough to begin with. And
then I listened to what the judge, Todd Lang, had to say
about it.
Judge Lang: I love that AI. Thank you for that. And as angry
as you are and justifiably angry as the family is, I heard the
forgiveness, and I know mister Hortacitas appreciate it, but so
did I. As I said, I like to think I would do that. I don't
know that I would.
But I love the beauty in what Christopher and I call him
Christopher. I always call people by their last names. It's
a formality of the court, but I feel like calling him
Christopher as we've gotten to know him today. I feel that that
was genuine, that his obvious forgiveness of mister Jorge
Cicitas reflects the character I heard about today. But it also
says something about the family because you told me how angry
you were, and you demanded the maximum sentence.
And even though that's what you wanted, you allowed Chris to
speak from his heart as you saw it. I didn't hear him asking for
the maximum sentence.
Hans Buetow: Respectfully, your honor. No. You didn't. You
didn't hear it because he never said it because he's dead. What
you heard, everything that you heard, judge Lang, was the words
of his sister run through a machine, a sister who told four
zero four media in an interview that quote, our goal was to make
the judge cry.
Our goal was to bring Chris to life and humanize him. Judge
Lang knows that this was AI generated, but you can hear over
the course of his comments how much he anthropomorphizes the
simulation. He calls it Christopher. He begins talking
about the victim in the present tense. This has affected him.
Pelkey's sister accomplished her goal. So the prosecution had
been asking for a sentence of nine years. And then following
the testimony that he knew wasn't real, judge Lang gave
Gabriel Horkasidis the maximum sentence of ten and a half years
in prison. This isn't a personal decision. Do I make an AI model
of my dead brother?
This is a societal question. Where? How? And how much of this
do we tolerate? I don't know where to draw that line.
But one thing this makes absolutely clear to me is that
even people whose job it is to soundly, dispassionately, and
accurately evaluate and judge things seem to be confused.
Maybe this is making a mountain out of a molehill. This is just
one person, after all. But this is person in a position of
power, who has now set a precedent. And this is not not
worrying.
I'm not not worried.
Judge Lang: I'm not
Jeff Ongstad: really sure why it's doing that.
Hans Buetow: So there I am look too close. In this council
meeting this past March, watching example after example
of AI animating still images turning into videos.
Jeff Ongstad: But it is kind of amazing how it can take these
and have all these kids move and do stuff and we're this kid
keeps changing to different people.
Hans Buetow: I'm tempted by it.
Jeff Ongstad: But it can look at something
Hans Buetow: I'm repulsed by it. I feel like I can hold both of
those at once.
Jeff Ongstad: And like if you looked at this kind of stuff,
probably like even six months ago, was nowhere near this and I
figure in the next six months it'll progress even more. And I
know
Hans Buetow: But I'm thinking, what do we think we're learning
from this? As media consumers, how much do we understand about
the power we're witnessing or wielding ourselves? I'm not sure
what lesson we're taking or more probably not taking.
Jeff Ongstad: Something
Hans Buetow: is happening. I'm not sure what, but we can see
that it's already having an impact.
Jeff Ongstad: Do you have any questions I'd be happy to
answer?
City Council Member: Questions from counsel? Jeff, thank you
very much.
Jeff Ongstad: Thank you. And I can leave support we have.
City Council Member: And yeah. This is great. And
Jeff Ongstad: I'll use it I'll use my power wisely from now.
Thank you very much.
City Council Member: Thank you. Appreciate you taking the time
to come out and give us the annual report.
Hans Buetow: Huge, huge thank you to Doctor. Don Carlton for
talking to me for this segment. You can learn more about the
Eddie Adams collection and the whole of the Dolph Briscoe
Center, it's very cool, at briscoecenter.org. Thank you
also to Amy, Kevin, Kristen, Munna, Seth, Martha, Dana,
Eddie, James, and everyone else who submitted their thoughts and
recordings about the difference between a still and a moving
image. I am interested in what you think that difference is and
whether or not you would animate any of your family photos or any
other photos.
Please let me know. Get in touch at 651615507, drop us a line at
our website, or email us at the neverpost@gmail.com. I wanna
know how you feel about all of it. All that in the show notes.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, June 18. In
2019, Rove Concepts, a furniture manufacturer, surveyed 2,000
American households and found that the average couch contained
$1.55 in change. That is nearly halfway to a monthly Neverpost
membership. Go check the car.
Maybe that winter coat you put away a couple months ago. The
chair by the window. The one that you love to read in. That
has gotta have at least 30¢ in it. What I'm saying here is that
there is $4 just laying around your house that you're not even
using and we will.
We'll use it to pay our hosting costs. We'll use it to pay
contributing producers. We'll put it towards our research
budget and more. Never poe dot s t to become a member. $4 a
month.
That's just over two and a half couches worth of change. Never
post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the
mysterious. Doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer
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and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta.
Moving, variant ornithography of those uninitiated made into
memory by the me briefly incarnate. Full of myself on
successive nights dense and alone sings you back. Need keeps
the book of dying open, the language common after all.
Relieved, the task finally changing prompts, tapping my
reserve feeling now wise to its edge. Where are you risk any
detail of what's in me having been tricked by that image of
man?
Excerpt of Fourth Fourth by Gil Ott. Never Post is a production
of Charts and Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia.