Future Human: Identity as a raw material in the digital age

Identity as a raw material.

Living in an age where we outsource our likeness to AI systems implies our identity and likeness become the new breed of raw materials. Stick that into your materials library and glossary.

We as humans, our appearance, unique markers, voice, skin, style, body language are the new thing to extract and mine for the digital realm. Much easier than cloning us in a lab. Much more scalable too.

Just like water, fibre, minerals, wood are extracted from the earth to manufacture the infrastructure us humans rely upon.

Artist and Composer Holly Herndon pioneered an AI clone of her voice with Holly+. Recently Grimes announced anyone could now create songs using her voice, with her Elf.Tech open-source software program. By turning her likeness into an AI medium, Grimes plants a stake into owning her identity and exploring the landscape of ‘co-op creativity’.

With deepfakes generating instant virality such as the recent Drake and Weeknd fake collab, owning our clones and implementing royalty fees will help artists like Grimes draft a new economic model in the age of AI and digital lifeforms. One that could become ubiquitous and not strictly for celebrities - at a premium of course. 

Voice isn’t the only frontier. Metahumans of celebrities are becoming normalised. Supermodel Eva Herzigová released her own digital clone for projects, campaigns, and any other immersive activation, describing the experience of creating her identical avatar as “giving birth to herself” in a recent Vogue Business interview.

We are engineering a new class of manufacturing materials in what we think are benign ways. We consider them novel and intriguing. After all we are exploring, as humans do. But I am not sure we understand the new foundations we are creating.

That should be clear to anyone who clones their likeness in the form of an avatar, voice, face or any other previously deemed unique physical marker of our personal human identity. It’s not just your identity you are tinkering with, it’s all of humanities. No pressure.

It’s only natural to want to innovate. But in the times we live in, everything is inherently loaded with responsibilities. We know it but we can’t help ourselves. Don’t look up feels sometimes prophetic.

There is a sense what we are doing is both provocative and sacrificial. Perhaps even a form of insurance when everything seems up for grabs, including the only thing we thought we owned (our skin, our voice, our inflections, our imperfections)? Or perhaps a very clever and future facing business strategy? The jury is out.

War journalist, author and TV presenter, Anjan Sundaram whom I interviewed for Dazed Beauty in How Data is changing the future of beauty explained once at the Oslo Freedom Summit the ways you can detect dictatorship. One of them is when people are self-harming or harming each other.

The AI arms race is led by corporations and Anjan, during our phone conversation pointed out, something I couldn’t include in our interview ‘in some ways the corporate world is a dictatorial world because unlike governments, companies aren’t beholden to share their data and be scrutinised in the way that governments are.’

We are engaged in an evolutionary battle between ourselves as living beings, our digital living forms and organisational entities. These organisational entities prevail in systems we feel we need in order to subsist.

So we try to tame 'the beast' by both becoming and feeding it the very same material it needs to survive. So that we can also survive (the AI arms race). Feedback loop. 

This is changing humankind at a level some want to see as mythical, as if we were gods.

Leading voices in AI regularly refer to mythical beings: the Golem in the recent talk titled The AI dilemma by The Center for Humane Technology (same people who did the Social Dilemma doc). The Moloch in Max Tegmark’s interview with Lex Fridman The Case for Halting AI Development. Grabbing for myths is a bi product of Silicon Valley’s culture of ‘high weirdness’ which is at the heart of AI, quoting author Mike Miller “God, Human, Animal, Machine. Singularity is a very mythic concept”. I recommend his recent interview with the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, where they discuss why AI can profoundly unsettle our sense of reality and our own humanity.

Pro-Nuances and Anti-Binary thinking.

I also think there is a beautiful side to this. In the sense we are witnessing the evolution of our species in real time. And a new definition of consent over our bodies.

When actors, artists and creators agree to outsource their likeness to AIs and are compensated for it, a new ecosystem of legalities and agreements can be forged. Potentially a new branch of pop culture has been born too.

With cultural influencers taking full reign over their digital permutations, this could be the tipping point for the mainstreaming of digital products such as clothing, and other bi-products. We are one technology away from this, should Augmented Reality transform our lives as recently shared by Humane’s founder Imran Chaudry. With cultural producers embodied in their variety of lifeforms now switched on 24 hours a day, to the max, how far will future media go?

Futurist Douglas Rushkoff explains that human beings in a digital environment are becoming more and more like machines essentially defined by digital materials whilst the algorithms are becoming more and more like “living entities” stating “They act as if they are our evolutionary successors.”

It's dizzying. But it may push the boundaries of self expression. It may push us into spaces we can inhabit and own as humans. We are blessed with creativity and ingenuity and I hope we can build out ways to use AI that are sustaining for the people and planet, incorporating agency over our bodies and minds.

I am not 100% convinced this is happening now or any time soon when it comes to owning full agency over our AI clones. They seem to have a tendency to go rogue, given the black box aspect of AIs, which even leading AI experts can’t fully understand as we get closer to creating AGI (superior to Human intelligence). And the very organisational entities leading the AI arms race have as their primary financial incentives to control our behaviours.

Even the more reason to pioneer creator-led alternatives.

| Geraldine Wharry