Know your worth & onto the next

My AI Headshots Experiment, Drake Bell's Music Video, and Liquid Death's Enema Kit.

Good afternoon to all you wiry spelunkers!

This week’s headlines feature a whole lot of family updates — babies, weddings, divorces. I strongly believe that I’ll either be married zero times or twice, which I think is kind of comforting because it takes a lot of pressure off the first wedding. It’s just a dry run!

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The Low-Brow Lowdown

Tucker Carlson & Don Lemon get merked on the same day. The network figureheads were axed by Fox and CNN in Purge 9: Broadcast News. Lemon claims he was informed of the news by his agent, while CNN countered that he was given the opportunity to speak to management. Either way, I’m sure he got a generous Chris Harrison-esque exit package and should just start a podcast and relax.

Black Mirror confirms a S6 release date in June. The anthology cast includes Aaron Paul, Annie Murphy, Kate Mara, Michael Cera, and Salma Hayek, among other less famous people.

Travis Barker collabs on an Enema Kit with Liquid Death. It’s called the “Enema of the State Collectible Enema Kit” and retails for $182. It’s apparently not for medical use, you’re just supposed to display it proudly in your home.

Halsey cops to using their own breastmilk for skincare. They also ended things with their boyfriend / Baby Daddy Alev Aydin, but I don't think that deserves the lede in this scenario.

Daniel Radcliffe and his girlfriend have their first kid. The news was first broadcast by the Daily Mail, who photographed the couple pushing a stroller. They have not shared the baby’s gender or how long he’s been putzing around.

Drake Bell’s wife files for divorce. He claims that he found out about it from TMZ (okay, Chrishell) and used the opportunity to promote his new song in the same breath. But I have to talk about the music video for a sec — it’s like an “ironic” (?) old-school ad for an airline that features a disconcerting amount of gelatinous food. And after six days, its view count is at 77K.

Glen Powell and Gigi Paris split up. What did I say??! Relationships end and now he is single and ready to date Taylor, per my fantasy draft. Sydney Sweeney is still engaged to what’s-his-face, and who hasn’t flirted with their hot coworker?

Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper gets engaged to the guy who produced To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. I still can’t forget that interview she did where she said that every morning when she wakes up she texts her boyfriend “Coffee and Henry!” and he brings her her coffee and her dog in bed. If he’s as much of a bigshot Hollywood producer as he implies, shouldn’t he be off scouting forests or something?

Chris Appleton & Lukas Gage have a Vegas wedding. And my GIRL Kim K officiated! Shania Twain performed. What an honor for them.

Simone Biles gets married on a budget. She wore a $120 dress and $35 Amazon shoes to her courthouse ceremony with Houston Texans player Jonathan Owens. They’ll have a bigger wedding celebration at a later date.

While Sofia Richie probably spent billions. Sofia tied the knot with record executive Elliot Grange in the South of France. She wore a “trio of dresses” from Chanel for the weekend’s festivities.

Are AI Headshots a Cure for Body Dysmorphia? Probably No, But Maybe.

In the late 20-teens, I was such a camera whore. Not because I ever thought I was particularly attractive, but because making people believe me to be felt like my own personal version of an Ocean’s heist: picking some heinous dress from my ModCloth collection, locating an obnoxious flower wall or indoor swing, trying 500 angles to find the one photo where I looked skinny, FaceTuning my eyes to the Sailor Moon and back, scheduling the post for “peak scroll hour,” and topping it off with a douchey Drake lyric.

When I spent my senior year in LA, my best friend and I would go lightyears out of our way to the most ridiculous places where we thought we might find a cute photo opp — like, we hit up an Arctic-themed pop-up for literal children, not because we were pedophiles but because we were pursuing a photogenic ball pit somewhere on site.

Growing up chubby, frumpy, and without a modicum of male interest, showing off my weight loss when I hit college via dumb Instagram posts helped me reaffirm to myself that I was finally the person I wanted to be, even if the comments section was filled only by the obligatory “slay bitch!” endorsements from my closest female friends.

Today, without the collegiate leanness I once relied on for a confidence boost, photos opps have the reverse effect: they’re an uncomfortable reminder of how I'm perceived by the world or how I look in relation to others. If I avoid them, then I can protect the sliver of peace of mind that I have — that I look as presentable as I thought I looked walking out of the house in the morning, and that that’s the version of me everyone has been interfacing with all day, not Danny DeVito’s long lost twin.

As many a trend piece has posited, the days of the color factory are long gone, and a “good” photo in 2023 is one that’s effortless. Smiling in front of the Louvre on your European vacation means you’re a loser try-hard, so even more innate confidence and control of your body is necessary to achieve something that’s sexy while also seeming candid and unbothered. Looking at your shoes coyly (?) with a half smile is never as easy in practice as the TikTok posing tutorials make it out to be!

All this to say, when I needed to submit a headshot for something this week, the options from recent history were limited.

A lot of reviews of AI headshots had come my way on TikTok, and the quick glimpses looked nice — in retrospect, this is because I wasn’t intimately familiar with what the subjects actually looked like.

I did some half-assed research and came across a Mashable article detailing an experience with a site called Ai SuitUp! (lol) that included a 50% off discount code. The writer had terrible results, reporting that only 3 or 4 out the 100 shots were usable, but that didn’t seem like losing stats to me, considering that’s slightly better than the typical outcome of one of my IRL photoshoots. Plus, I needed something to write about this week.

Once you pay (it’s normally $20, but I got it for $10) you need to upload fifteen pictures of yourself, plus “your best selfie,” which is a lot of pressure to put on any person other than EmRata!

The photos need to be solo shots, have a variety of backgrounds, and are supposed to be mostly close-ups on your face versus full-body. Which basically means 15 existing headshots from different days, and if I had that, I wouldn’t be paying AI to make new ones.

I had to scour through my archives to find enough material, most of which probably did not comply with their requirements.

After forty minutes of the robots fucking around with their finger paints, I got an email that my images were ready.

For context, this is what I actually look like / what I submitted:

The results felt like they found another white woman who looked sort of like me, but maybe ten years older while also living ten years in the past. The clothing was dated, they mostly had voluminous auburn hair, and they all looked like they were auditioning to be an anchor on a local Minnesota news channel.

Just as Mashable foretold, only a handful of the photos even remotely looked like me, and coincidentally, they were all in black and white.

Rather than simply cut my losses and move on to my egg white omelette, I decided to engage in some light espionage and conduct an experiment to see how my friends reacted to the pictures when I told them they had come from a professional photoshoot.

I picked three “selects,” and posted them to my close friends Instagram story, asking my unsuspecting pals for help choosing which option should be my LinkedIn profile picture.

I added some flair to the captions to increase believability, like why my hair looked like it came out of a Pantene commercial. And like with most of my schemes, I forced my reluctant roommate to get involved.

I’m a little bit of a known troll, so I was curious to see if people would call my bluff or if they would simply not acknowledge the post in case I was actually being genuine. Like when JoJo Siwa got the face car, I’m sure a bunch of her friends just pretended they didn't see the post.

For context as we get into the results of the experiment, I have 35 people on my close friends list, and when I post some of my best work, I might get five or six replies.

When I posted the AI photo series, out of the 35 friends, 32 viewed the stories. In a wild turn of events, 17 replied to me directly and 25 voted in my poll. That’s a SEVENTY-EIGHT percent engagement rate — marketers will know that is well above industry standard. At the very least, the AI was eliciting reactions from people.

Out of the 17 replies, 14 of them were overwhelmingly positive, telling me how hot I was, asking for the name of the photographer, encouraging me to post on main, etc. Only three people immediately identified the AI, and interestingly, they are all artists.

My sister said she “hated to ask” if it was AI because she didn’t want to be mean, while my friend Kyle brought it up outright. Zoé, who Gauche Goblins have met before, took a nastier route, taking a shot at my “linebacker build” in photo 2.

This made me question if the photo supporters were actually fooled by the images, believing there’s a world where hair extensions and some aggressive airbrushing could make me look like that. Or, were they simply hyping me up out of pity? How sad that our insecure friend has stooped to passing off AI pictures as herself, let’s not embarrass her further by calling her out.

I’ll give an Uncultured Update next week if anyone comes out of the woodwork after reading this to tell me they were secretly talking shit with our friends in a group chat, which would be well within their right — it’s an awkward position be honest in this scenario! You have to be pretty tight with someone to ask them if their photo is AI — it’s like asking if their engagement ring is zirconia: it could easily lead to a friendship-ending feud. Just ask the cast of Selling Sunset!

I took this class in college about environmental ethics, and there was this whole unit on manufactured nature, like land that has been touched in some way by man, and if that counts as “real nature.” And if no one knows that it was once touched, how does that impact our perception or definition?

Similarly, I feel like there’s probably some ethical line surrounding passing off an AI image as yourself, but does it really differ that greatly from the amount of Photoshop celebrities get to enjoy on their public-facing assets? Or is the line that, in the case of the heavy Photoshop, at least that image was you in its original state, while the AI image never was and therefore never could be, making the lie less palatable.

If my friends’ endorsements were in fact sincere and they believed the images to be real, and if the photos were like 40% more realistic and 30% less NFL-inspired, maybe there’s a world where I would have used one. I was able to coordinate the whole thing from my couch with none of the stress, pressure, or anxiety that comes from taking photos while experiencing body dysmorphia, all for the price of a venti Macchiato with an extra shot.

This is not to say that I think AI should replace real photographers, but for those of us who are so awkward in our skin that a professional photoshoot would leave us with the same end result as burning $500 cash, it could present a less emotionally debilitating option as the technology advances. Or, at the very least, give you this:

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Prekend Wrapped

• Watching: Baby J (Netflix)

• Reading: “A Century of the New York ‘It’ Girl. 151 women who captured the city’s attention.” (The Cut)

• Listening: I’m going to listen to the new Jack Harlow album tomorrow, okay??! Sue me.