I’ll keep this brief.
When I was a kid there was Josephine the Plumber selling me Comet and Madge the Manicurist selling me Palmolive dishwashing soap.
Okay, my Mom was the target audience but nevertheless I liked them and thought they were lots of fun.
But neither I, nor almost anyone else, ever thought they were real.
Josephine was a can-do, no b.s. kind of gal in white overalls, the kind of person you’d expect to see playing Aunt Eller in a regional theatre production of Oklahoma if the character of Josephine actually existed and was not a creation of Madison Ave. and veteran comic movie actress Jane Withers.
As for Madge, she wore a pale blue uniform and seemed to have been around long enough to impart to you not only the latest gossip but many of the most carefully kept beauty secrets of the world. Among them was her reveal to a rather shocked customer in every TV commercial over 30 years that the tray of dewy liquid she had their fingers dunked in at the nail station was actually Palmolive soap.
How she managed to convince millions of 1960s housewives that hand washing their dishes with this stuff was the equivalent of bathing their hands in a youthful elixir was in large part due to Jan Miner, the classically trained theatre actress who had a long career both on and off-Broadway, including numerous Shakesperean productions.
Now, there is nothing wrong using your natural talents to create and promote all sorts of things. After all, we humans need to make a living.
What is troubling to The Chair, aka Me, was this article on the cover of the NY Times Arts section on Saturday
It described the labors of a large handful of A.I. “creators,” and several A.I. content firms that employ them. It seems they are hard at work on building dozens of “personas” of artificial people to sell products, expertise and even images of beauty so all of us real people can become just like their advanced selves.
Talk about chasing the dragon…
Many of these artificial people will even be given pseudo real-life backstory bios to make us relate to and trust them and subscribe to what they are selling. Things like a dead brother, a history of being bullied they had to overcome or a broken love affair that almost destroyed them.
Is nothing sacred? Not even a lousy boyfriend in my past???
Yes, that was rhetorical.
In some cases, such as the literal fake pouty blonde model who didn’t exist that was used by Guess in an ad last summer in Vogue, they want young women to aspire to look like them.
Parents beware.
As well as anyone who thought they ever looked good in a pair of jeans.
Well, perhaps this is old news.
No doubt, many of you have heard about the literal fake movie actress named Tilly Norwood that has an agent and a planned feature film in the works. I even wrote about it here.
But it seems she is just the tip of the Waymos, I mean, sidewalk delivery robots, I mean BellaBots, I mean _____________.
Here are some influencers, sellers, personas – aka 2026-2030’s version of Josephine and Madge – to come that the NY Times so generously reported on:
Lila Walker, a ginger-haired granola girl that specializes in and hawks tips on knitting and crafting.
Nigel Thistledown, a white-bearded, bow-tied, beret-wearing, tea-sipping British gent who knows everything about gardening since he’s seated in his A.I. garden.
And finally, V. V. Steele, a snarky celebrity gossip who, according to this report, is a physical mashup of Kim Kardashian, Angelina Jolie and Veronica Lodge (Note: The latter from Archie comics fame).
Since A.I. uses images and knowledge of pretty much everything that has ever been posted, recorded, photographed or written about in existence, there will be no significant participation for pretty much any of the above, or any of us, who might have posted a thing or two about growing a plant, crocheting a sweater or predicting the next celebrity scandal.
Instead, the corporations/conglomerates/oligarchs who own the companies employing what I like to call the “faux creative button pushers” responsible for this digital slop will be the ones making the major dough.
That, is, if we frequent their non-human creation/things and what they are selling.
At least, Jane Withers and Jan Miner got to buy houses, do local theatre and support their families with their money.
Every other human being who ever sold you anything on a commercial, or at any real-life brick store, also got paid to for their efforts.
Even it wasn’t enough, at least it was at a living wage.
Because in some cases, they needed that money to do essential human things.
Like eat.
A.I. personas, bot things and digitized inventions based on all the niche knowledge in all the fields we, as a society, have generated, do not have to feed in the literal sense.
Though they are already feeding on us in other essential ways.
And unless we stop treating the acceptance of “them” and their “creators” as some sort of inevitable, unrestrainable progress, our fair share in every essential field in the zeitgeist will be swallowed whole by the lot of them.
Led by the oligarchical, uber elite who think we’re too dumb to notice.
notes from a chair 