I’m on notice. Me. Mr. Niceguy. The one who follows (almost) all the rules no matter how boring that makes me. Still, I’m the one in trouble.  But… I admit I did what I’ve been accused of. No “not guilty by reason of I said so” plea for me. No, I did it, I got caught, and I’ll tell you and whoever else wants to know, I’m going to do it again! I posted a manipulated picture. And the bad thing about that is, I didn’t say it wasn’t real. Here it is.

Some of you might recognize this. It is the “cover art” that accompanied the ROAMcare blog post Spring Cleaning. I wanted a picture of a spray of daffodils and a red convertible. As luck would have it, I happened to have in my own photo library two very such pictures, and in years past, I would have spent hours cropping them, removing backgrounds, matching sizes, colors, brightness, and perspectives, then combining them and adding the resulting composite to the placeholder, overlay the text, and finally celebrate the job well done with a bowl of moose tracks ice cream. Instead, I took advantage of a tool at my disposal and told my handy dandy image generator (i.e. AI app), “show a spray of daffodils with a red convertible in the background,” and dished out the ice cream while it thought about this for a while. I knew it wouldn’t be exactly what I wanted but I made up for that with an extra scoop

Some time later, I added that image to our website, the email campaign, and the social media sites, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the one that used to be known as Twitter. And there was the problem child. That last one. The one that doesn’t even have enough confidence in itself to give itself a name, just some generic letter used for centuries as the signature stand-in for the illiterati. It dared to lock the organization account until I could prove we are humans. Thus, I was forced to solve a series of computer-generated puzzles to prove I am myself not computer-generated.

I suppose I will now be counted among the many when the owner of said anonymous site defends his company from claims of spreading questionable if not outright false information by saying “Why in the last month alone we limited access and deterred the activities of 196 billion, and that’s so big it starts with a b billion, users caught red-handed posting AI manipulated photos. We the best there is at not spreading lies. And while we’re at it, the earth is flat and we know smart people who say so!”

And guess what? I did the same thing a week later when I posted a generated image of two geese sitting on eggs in a nest. What can I say. Lock me up!

Every life is a life worth living. Celebrate with us the memory of a man who kept so many very much alive in Staying Alive.