That's Not My Face

Yesterday I left myself with a problem.

Lore Lassen needed a face.

I had already given this woman a name, a career, bestselling novels, a movie adaptation, a publishing house, an estate, a fandom I don't have yet, encrypted files, a coded notebook, and her own fucking domain.

Surely finding her a face would be the easy part.

It was not.

At first I thought I could build Lore's website without showing her.

Maybe she was private. Maybe there were photographs where you never quite saw her face. Maybe I could photograph her from behind or obscure her enough that readers could fill in the rest.

Except she's supposed to be famous.

That doesn't work.

Then I considered asking a friend if I could use her photographs.

And that got weird almost immediately.

Because I wouldn't just be borrowing someone's face for a character.

I'd be using her face to create a bestselling author. Then I'd be making photographs of that author traveling, signing books, attending premieres, disappearing, being photographed without permission, becoming the subject of theories and scrutiny after she's gone.

That's a lot to ask someone to lend you.

And meanwhile, Nachlass had developed another layer.

I've been thinking about how Lore's unfinished manuscript eventually gets reconstructed.

Her readers can submit theories. Solve pieces of the cipher. Maybe even write fanfiction or attempt missing scenes.

And then there is AI.

If Lore leaves behind enough material—published novels, unfinished manuscripts, rough drafts, journals, marginalia, notes, interviews, recordings—someone could theoretically feed all of that into an AI and ask it to imitate her.

Her vocabulary. Her rhythms. Her sentence structure. Her habits. Her voice.

Then use that imitation alongside what her readers create to help finish the manuscript.

Which raises a fairly horrifying question:

If it sounds like Lore, is it Lore?

And somewhere in the middle of thinking about that, I realized I already knew what her face should be.

Mine.

Or, more accurately:

A likeness of mine.

Which is funny because I hate AI photographs of myself.

Hate them.

They give me that uncanny valley feeling almost immediately.

I know my face.

I know my nose. I know my chin. I know what my eyes do when I smile. I know how my cheeks move. I know what I look like from the side.

So when AI gives me a woman who is almost me, my brain immediately goes:

Nope.

That's not my nose.

That's not my chin.

That's not how I smile.

That's not me.

And I've noticed I do the same thing when people I actually know post AI photographs of themselves.

I recognize them.

And simultaneously, I don't.

My brain knows who the image is supposed to be, but it also knows something is wrong.

Which always makes me think of Twenty One Pilots:

“My name's Blurryface and I care what you think.”

I have always thought that was one of the most profound lyrics for the generation we're living in.

We blur our faces because we care what people think.

We smooth the lines. Remove the spots. Change the shape. Fix the light. Filter the skin. And now we can hand our photographs to AI and ask it to make an entirely new version of us.

A better version.

Except better according to whom?

The machine?

The people looking at us?

Ourselves?

At what point do you perfect your own face until you're no longer presenting your face at all?

And what does staring at that perfected version do when you eventually look in the mirror?

I don't know.

But I know I don't want to erase everything my actual face has done.

Wrinkles mean I've moved it.

Lines around my eyes mean I've smiled.

Sunspots mean the sun has shone on my face.

There are pieces of grief and exhaustion and laughter and age written into a face.

That's part of the record too.

And this is especially funny because I recently paid actual money to have professional author photographs taken at Metanoia Boudoir in South Carolina.

I got there early. I had my hair and makeup done. I spent the day posing. We chose clothes and lighting and settings and created a visual language for my website.

I paid an artist to make photographs of my actual likeness.

And someone still asked me if they were AI.

No.

I was there.

I remember taking them.

There is a human being behind the camera and a human being in front of it.

And somehow we've reached a point where a beautiful photograph of a real person can look suspicious because artificial photographs have become convincing enough that we now question the real ones too.

Which brought me right back to Lore.

What if the thing I dislike about AI photographs of myself is exactly what makes them right for her?

She can look like me without being me.

Close enough to recognize.

Wrong enough to belong to someone else.

So today I started building Lore Lassen out of my likeness.

And it has been fascinating.

Sometimes I look at her and immediately think, that's me.

Sometimes I think, absolutely fucking not. Who is that woman?

Sometimes she's somewhere in between.

And that's Lore.

She's borrowing my face.

She's already borrowing my hand.

She's borrowing my brain.

Eventually, someone inside her story may borrow my voice.

And suddenly the uncanny valley isn't an unfortunate side effect of making photographs for a fictional author.

It's part of the experiment.

Because the question underneath Nachlass isn't only whether someone has the right to finish another person's manuscript.

It's how much of another person you're allowed to reconstruct.

What happens when the author isn't there to approve the photograph?

What happens when fans keep generating new images of her?

What happens when they write stories in her world?

What happens when they imitate her voice?

What happens when an estate owns the files, a publisher owns certain rights, readers feel ownership over the stories, and a machine can reproduce something frighteningly close to the person who made them?

How far is too far?

At what point are you preserving someone?

At what point are you impersonating them?

At what point are you exploiting them?

And who owns a likeness once the person it belonged to isn't there to say:

That's not me.

Which is where this entire week folded back into the book I've been working on all along.

A Shadow Taken.

I've spent the week writing about a young woman sitting before a camera and allowing someone else to capture her likeness.

A technology that could make a version of her that would remain after she was gone.

And while writing that book, I accidentally created another woman from my own.

Lore Lassen isn't me.

But she looks enough like me to make me uncomfortable sometimes.

Perfect.

I think that's exactly what she should do.