🆕 Never Post! Reanimator: AI and Shared Histories

Friends! Stupendous news! A [not?] beautiful new Never Post for you. This week, Hans confronts the technological, moral, and philosophical impacts of using Artificial Intelligence to animate still photos, including those of both personal and historical significance. Also: Pet Sounds!

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Intro Links

• Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky
• This Cybersecurity Startup Is Quietly Moderating X’s Community Notes to Fight Crypto Scams
• Scam Sniffer
• Nancy Mace ran bot army, had staff run fake accounts to boost profile, report claims: ‘It’s what she does for fun’
• RFK Jr.'s MAHA Report Cites Research Studies That Don't Exist
• The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist
• Roblox’s Hit Farm Game Spurs Underground Digital Fruit Economy

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Animating History

• Falcon Heights, MN City Council Meeting - March 26, 2025
• Errol Morris at NYPL
• Synthesis of a Vocal Sound from the 3,000 year old Mummy, Nesyamun ‘True of Voice’
• Making a Dead Lion Roar
• Dolph Briscoe Center for American History
• Saigon Execution
• Oral History with Eddie Adams
• oldphoto.ai
• Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision
• Ways of Seeing
• 'I Loved That AI:' Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage Incident

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. This episodes contributing producer was Tori Dominguez Peek. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

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.

Literally. Quick notice that this segment contains discussions of war, execution, and murder.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And then towards the end of his presentation, things suddenly changed.

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.

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.

Just one area that we're using is is like in old photographs and stuff to animate those.

As he says this

So we can take old photos like this and not only clean them up, but then bring them to life.

Everyone in the picture starts to move.

And that's just from an old photograph.

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.

What I like about photographs is that they're wormholes into history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, this photograph, which has many names, by the way, over the years, know, but it's been generally called the Saigon Execution.

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.

He took the photograph during the Tet Offensive, and the Vietnam War, which was in February of nineteen sixty eight.

Eddie Adams was out scouting a story of a nearby skirmish between police, soldiers, and Viet Cong.

Xolon is a Chinese section of Saigon.

This is Eddie in an interview with the AP prior to his death.

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.

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?

And they just kept walking up maybe about a hundred yards to the corner.

This man, who was unidentified at the time, had his hands tied behind his back.

And they stopped for a minute. I was about five feet away from the prisoner.

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.

To my left came this guy, I had no idea.

General Lone, he was their boss, walked up to the group and he reached for his pistol.

He went over and I seen him go for his pistol.

Eddie was standing there with his camera.

It had a 35 millimeter lens and a single frame camera.

He had just zero idea about what Long was going to do.

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.

At the moment, literally, that Lone fired the shot

That was the incident that he shot him.

Into the alleged terrorist's right temple, almost point blank.

And I didn't I had no idea that he was gonna do this.

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.

According to the US army, they said the bullet was still in his head when the picture was taken.

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.

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.

I think there's so much power in that.

Well, it's a it is an incredibly powerful photograph.

This

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.

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.

The day after it was taken, the photograph appeared on front pages of newspapers all around the world.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The napalm girl.

Napalm girl. Yeah. Which interestingly was also filmed.

Yes. That's true.

Yeah. But like that photo and Eddie's photo, like have a life that those films don't and never will.

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.

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.

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.

To answer that for myself, I wanted to start by getting a compass from my family, my friends, my friends of friends.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These perceptions of both still and moving images all hinge on our ability to move through time.

The most important thing about paintings themselves is that their images are silent still.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All images are subject to perspective. They are not moments themselves, but windows into them.

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.

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.

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.

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?

There's more information in a moving image for sure. There's just more context.

Beyond the frame is everything else.

The meaning of an image can be changed according to what you see beside it or what comes after it.

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.

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.

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.

A still image is, more easily controllable, more easy to hide the truth, actually.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Picture and my voice profile.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not

really sure why it's doing that.

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.

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.

I'm tempted by it.

But it can look at something

I'm repulsed by it. I feel like I can hold both of those at once.

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

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.

Something

is happening. I'm not sure what, but we can see that it's already having an impact.

Do you have any questions I'd be happy to answer?

Questions from counsel? Jeff, thank you very much.

Thank you. And I can leave support we have.

And yeah. This is great. And

I'll use it I'll use my power wisely from now. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Appreciate you taking the time to come out and give us the annual report.

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.

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.

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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.