Broken Trust, Aching Heart

False images, stolen words, and their collateral damage

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

An online friend knows I appreciate landscapes, so she sent me a link to a rising star photographer, a guy she knows. And, wow, his compositions are stunning! Snowcapped mountains pour into deep, dark valleys, a pine forest sparkles greenish-silver, and pillow-clouds float around blue, blue skies. I flip through his slideshow, pausing to enlarge a beautiful photo. I want to move on, but I’ve developed an automatic reflex, a weird twitch: My thumb and forefinger form an L then contract to a pincer, again and again, L …Pinch…L … Pinch… L…Pinch. I squint into the screen, wondering — Are these hills enhanced? Is this grass CGI? Can a sky really be that shade of lapis? Did he copy/paste those puffy clouds? A mad scientist trying to find flaws in DNA, I expand the pictures, L …L…L…, until the pixels reach their atomic structure. Then pinch, pinch, pinch, I twist and turn the slides like ants caught dangling between thumb and forefinger. I distort and contort every vista, stopping only when I realize that I can no longer see the forest for the trees. I’ve been at this with such great intensity that my eyes are teary, not for the photographer or for his art, but with the pain of my distrust. I’ve grown — more like diminished — into someone so afraid of seeing herself as a stupid mark, easily duped by fakery, that she is no longer able to trust the beauty of a pristine photo.

Broken trust, aching heart

In the pediatrician’s office, I squirmed, so nervous that I almost made myself sick. It was only those popular Highlight Magazines, stacked on wobbly tables, that could distract us whimpering children from the long needles that delivered impending injections into our tender flesh. Turning the glossy pages, the colorful images swept us away from the threat of measles-mumps-rubella and the pungency of witch hazel. My favorite puzzle was “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” A pitcher of milk perched in the middle of a baseball diamond, a clock on the scoreboard struck thirteen, and a two-legged table floated above the bleachers. I thought, wow, you have to be real dumb-dumb to miss these mistakes. I gleefully circled the misplaced images as I mocked the imaginary Stupid-Girl sitting next to me. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth as she missed every obvious flaw. I taunted, “This picture has so many mistakes, and YOU are stupid.”

Broken trust, aching heart

I can’t continue reading this new book. The prose is elegant, and every description is poetically precise. But I slam it shut. Not because I’m overcome with emotion or because I need to savor the imagery or roll its poetry in my mouth. No. It’s because I’m skeptical. I’ve stopped reading to toggle to Reddit to find suspicious cusses just like me. Turns out three others don’t believe this writer could’ve written this book without AI. Jimbobimbo says, “I don’t trust this shit.” Legomyego eggs him on, “Yeah, dude, half of it’s plucked from Chaucer or Shakespeare or whatever,” followed by DevilsFood666, who is sure: “It’s AI slop.” I’m getting excited as I consider pitching in my two cents: Yeah, Broh, it ain’t legit. I am a nasty little Napoleon, up on my high horse, ready to lead the Grande Army of Cool Kids into battle. But I stop myself in time. Inhale, exhale, sheath my saber, dismount. Because I remember hurtful accusations hurled at me long ago: “YOU CAN’T BE TRUSTED.” I remember what it feels like to be thought of as untrustworthy. And I remember that horrible moment I lost trust in myself.

Broken trust, aching heart

“Do you think you’re too big for your britches?” At ten years old, I wasn’t aware of rhetorical questions. And I didn’t know what britches were, so I sat rigid against the high-backed chair, staring. The librarian plopped into her swivel seat and steered into me. “You didn’t forget to return the book … you STOLE it!” The Little House on the Prairie was a boulder at the bottom of my school bag. She snarled, “We’ll sit here as long as it takes for you to tell me where you hid my book. And I don’t care if we have to stay here ALL NIGHT!” Dinner was always at six sharp, and if I wasn’t there, my mom got mad. Will she look for me at my nine-thirty bedtime? Will Dad call the police? Will they put my picture on a milk carton? These weren’t rhetorical questions. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes sank to the floor and landed on a school bag with the iron-on Fred Flintstone grinning on the flap. The librarian was triumphant. Yaba-Daba-Doo! She wiggled her fingers, coaxing me to give up the loot. I dove into fantasyland, shoveling Wisconsin dirt to unearth the buried treasure, my favorite book, long overdue because I couldn’t yet bring myself to return it. When I handed it over, she released me, but not before getting in one last dig: “YOU CAN’T BE TRUSTED,” and I felt those words like a pebble in my shoe for years and years.

Broken trust, aching heart

But it’s not just me. Today’s festering skepticism, mistrust, and anger is a We-problem. And let the blame lie on bots and sentient swindlers who churn false images and the stolen words of real writers. The carefree bots beep and blip while boys-in-mamas-basement guzzle Red Bull, stoking themselves to fabricate fabrications which, in turn, turn you and me into cynical misanthropes. So, let’s stop deflecting blame and jumping to conclusions by misdirecting our outrage at the artists: Innocent is the talented photographer whose images we take in vain, and blameless is the author whose exquisite writing we do not, cannot, will not believe to be her own. No, no, no, the problem is not with Creatives who lay themselves — flay themselves — bare, to be ogled, questioned, judged. The problem is broken trust. Broken trust within ourselves. Our minds have been hacked by scammers who hide behind shrouded accounts like Jimbobimbo, Legomyego, and DevilsFood666. Anonymity enables them to evade the consequences of bringing us to this place where we no longer trust real sweeping montages — images so beautiful they hurt the eyes. And now, we struggle to immerse ourselves in writing so vulnerable that we feel it in our teeth. Because we are too busy chewing on sinuous cynicism. My God, what damage has been done by those digital grifters, those motherfakers! And in turn, what damage we do to others. And to ourselves.

Oh, our hearts, our hearts, our broken hearts.