The Real Me

The internet has long been a haven for fraud.  Way back when I first signed up for AOL in the latter part of 1996, the customer service rep was telling me about instant messaging and said, “You can send someone a picture of a bikini babe and tell them it’s you,” to which I replied, “Why on Earth would I want to do that?”  Almost thirty years later, that conversation seems rather quaint, and that type of fraud has pivoted 180^o, from real conversation paired with fake pictures to real pictures paired with fake conversation:

…many of OnlyFans’ top earners…hire…a management agency to help keep up with…customers’ demands for personal attention…they…provide…a team of contractors whose sole job is to masquerade as the creator while swapping DMs with her subscribers…agencies tend to favor contractors who reside in lower-wage countries…like the Philippines and Venezuela…these workers are relatively well-educated, with university-level English and ace typing skills…

And now, with the growing popularity of ML chatbots, this kind of deception doesn’t even require human assistants:

Riley…Reid’s…”clone”…is essentially a chatbot, except it’s been trained on Reid specifically.  So, when Reid’s [program] sends messages, they’re based on things IRL Reid has said; the facts that it shares are real; and, when it sends me voice notes, it speaks in Reid’s own tone and cadence…Reid, like many sex workers, has found herself unauthorisedly cloned on other sites..so she wanted to take matters into her own hands…”If I don’t engage, others will misuse my image”…

And given the increasing sophistication of computerized audiovisual doppelgangers, it seems likely that online reality will completely break down in the very near future.  Well, I want no part of it.  When I replied to that AOL rep a generation ago, I was not merely being a smartass; I honestly don’t see the point of such deception.  I mean, of course I understand why dishonest people might do it, and why a prominent sex worker might do it to head off someone else doing it to her.  But even as an escort, I never developed a work persona; I was always just me, and that has not changed.  People who meet me in real life have often commented that I speak like I write, and that IRL I’m just like I am online (except nicer).  And that’s not going to change.  When any of my readers interacts with me online, it’s really me, not an employee or computer program.  When you read one of my essays, you can be sure that it was really written by me, not shat out by a large language model.  Using one or more of these tricks might make my work easier or more lucrative, but it would also undermine my reasons for having an online presence in the first place.  So if you appreciate that, please do consider providing a little financial support; “bots” don’t need to eat or pay bills, but I sure do!