Developing A Grudge
An old woman brings in an old photo.
Customer: “This is a picture of my husband and me and some friends on our front lawn during the summer of 1968.”
Me: “Wow, it’s a great photo. Were you looking at some restorative work?”
Customer: “No. I need you to rotate the photo so I can see behind us. See how my husband’s hand looks like it’s touching Sharon’s a**? He always says he wasn’t, but look at his face! You can tell that he is!”
Me: “Uh… ma’am. That’s impossible.”
Customer: “No, it’s not, because Sharon was a total hussy back in the day, and—”
Me: “—No, ma’am, I mean technically impossible. I can’t rotate the image.”
Customer: “Yes, you can! I saw you have all that AI stuff now, and you can do all sorts of things.”
Me: “Uh, yes, technology has advanced incredibly, I’ll give you that, but AI is just a… a guess, based on what’s already in the photo. It can’t reveal information that isn’t already there. It can only extrapolate on the information already present in the image.”
Customer: “So… you can’t do it?”
Me: “No, ma’am. If you can’t tell from the photo with absolute certainty that your husband is… uh…”
Customer: “Groping Sharon’s a**.”
Me: “…yes, that. If that’s not in the image already, then AI isn’t going to suddenly make it so.”
Customer: “Is there any computer thing that could?”
Me: “Only a time machine, ma’am.”
She sighs, leans forward, and then starts shouting into the ground.
Customer: “You hear that down there, you two?! I’m not giving up! I’m gonna wait until they invent a time machine and then I’ll be proven right, just you see!”
