After last week's missive on AI (something I will try not to make a habit of, but we shall see), I felt I had to come clean about something.
While I promise never to use AI to write a blog post - mainly because I enjoy writing so much, rather than being from any particular sense of propriety - I used it heavily when moving this blog to it's new, post-Typepad platform but also to make me look a bit older.
My blog photo has been the same for quite some time (it's only the third I've used on the blog since it started 20 years ago), mainly because I like it so much.
The fact it has so much shadow has meant I could get away with not changing it for the longest time, but unfortunately time can be cruel: my beard has become so grey, over the years, that I was in danger of scaring blog readers when meeting them IRL. And with a DevCon coming up, I felt obliged to do something.
I therefore directed ChatGPT to make me a little greyer. And it did, while adjusting the lighting and giving me a slight smirk. But it's so close to the original that I'm going to bet that no-one noticed this change at all.
I can't say I'm unhappy with the results: the headshot is definitely more representative of my current greyness (it's good enough for now, at least) and it's certainly easier than asking my old friend Alan Bradford for another photo shoot (he's the photographer who took the last one), as I have no doubt he has better things to spend his time on. I actually consider this new photo to be a work of Alan's, in fact, because it's basically the same shot with some AI retouches.
Maybe I could be running some kind of OpenClaw-based agentic workflow that regenerates my blog's headshot each day, depending on how I look through my webcam? The sad thing is I honestly don't know whether I'm joking or not.
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