My dead father is “writing” me notes again

There are also cultural implications. We already live in a world where truth and lies intermingle due to AI synthesis. I have called it the “cultural singularity”—the point at which fact and fiction in media become indistinguishable. But while I love to act like I’ve discovered something new, maybe we already hit that point the first time someone forged a cuneiform tablet in ancient Babylon.

Part of my father will live on

Philosophical questions also come to mind from this experience. What does it mean if a machine can write just like my dad? Somewhere in the neural network’s weights, there is an approximation of my dad’s writing habits. Does that mean there is a piece of him in there somehow? If it looks like a duck and writes uppercase letters like a duck, is it a duck?

No doubt there are mechanisms at play wholly unlike my father’s mind, but the rules that once let his brain guide his hand to write have somehow been studied and replicated by a machine. That’s kind of wild.

I welcome you to download and use the “Dad’s Uppercase” model yourself on either Replicate or Civitai with no restrictions of any kind, aside from those found in the Flux.1 dev license, which I do not control. To activate the style with the best results, you’ll need to use the keyword “d4dupp3r” in your prompts. You can even build off of it if you like. I feel that even though it’s not scientifically true, it’s philosophically true that as long as that model is around, part of my dad is still around as well.

And finally, permit me the indulgence of writing a note in my dad’s hand that I know he’d write if he were still alive today. I’ve kept this image on my computer desktop for the past few weeks, and it still makes me smile when I see it.

What you see above is not a true document, but it represents a true idea. I believe we’ll need to keep that in mind as more people begin to use AI synthesis to compose different kinds of media artifacts. Whether electronic bits of an email or ink on animal parchment, the “authenticity” of the medium of transmission may be secondary; it’s the context, the motives of the messenger, and the veracity of the idea communicated that primarily matters.

My motive in creating the note was not to deceive anyone but to remind myself that my dad loved me. Thanks, Dad, for everything. For encouraging my curiosity in tech, for having better handwriting than me—and now, for sharing that handwriting with the world.