Is Newsom Real or is he AI?


There’s a serious article in the works on the current state of AI technology, but this post is mostly a fun way of showing how a sheaf of new apps are playing with its capabilities. It’s probably closer to Whwt most people imagine AI to be than the experts who are alternately promoting and fearing its life-changing potential. Not a bad way to prepare the soil for the planting of some new ideas later on.

Saw the article posted above and was immediately reminded of a cartoon app I had used on the Fovernor of California about a year ago.


I was happy enough with the result because it did resemble the Governor, but that didn’t stop me from using his name to open the post and make sure readers would recognize him on the steps of the Capitol. I made a number of cartoons for future reference, some of which I subsequently used when a given subject’s behavior was cartoonish enough.

Why I have something like 65,000 image files

It’s called exploring the technology. I do it all the time. I use what is free. A necessary constraint but one that keeps you honest and creative in the face of obstacles, kind of like the censorship of the Hays Office forced the Marx Brothers to do clean comedy instead of cheap and blue burlesque.

So apps like the one above have their uses, but they’re limited. They resemble theirs subjects but they never blue the line. There’s a place called the Uncanny Valley, where resemblances of digital animations to the original subjects are so close they unnerve people at a subconscious level. That’s where AI is supposed to be able to interfere with human perception for good or ill. 

So lately I’ve been looking into the capability of free-trial apps along these lines. It’s a lot of fun and a prodigious disk hog. But when I saw the pic of Newsom above, I was moved to try something with another app I’ve looked at but haven’t plumbed too deeply. 

It can do what the more cartoonish one above can do, as well as animate it in various ways.

For example it can take this photograph…


And turn it into this…


Cute, huh? Of course there’s every chance that the original photo used as an example is also an AI fabrication. Isn’t the original of this cartoon a little too pretty? No big deal in this example, but the app can also do far more ambitious transformations. For example, it can turn this guy into the slick avatar next to him.

Pretty damn close. But is it Uncanny Valley material, or just AI trickery?

The only way to test this is to try the same transformation with photos of real people. Here are a few of those, whom you’ll recognize as possible presidential candidates in 2028.







It’s good work obviously. But I don’t think we’re in the Uncanny Valley. Some idealization is being manufactured in the process, though not as subtly as the best makeup artists in Hollywood could effect it. Walz isn’t much to begin with, but the result is clearly an artificially improved Walz. Kamala is female, which complicates things, but even her unsophisticated natural expression is somehow blanker in the AI version. Wes Moore is a handsome man and needs no idealization, yet he is more sculptural than real in his avatar image. 

With the sex and race differences in our examples, it’s hard to tell if age differences have any impact. Walz is 61, Kamala is 60, and Moore is 47. What if we went older? Would that take us closer to the  Uncanny Valley? Two quick additional examples.




Michael Moore is 71, and Garrison Keillor is 84. The automatic move toward idealizing facial features seems to increase rather than decrease with age, and the verisimilitude is less. The only remaining factor we might consider a variable is that all of the original non-AI photos were almost certainly taken by professional photographers, even if they were acquired in snapshot conditions. Perhaps AI would respond differently to a truly amateur hand at the shutter. Why I put a snap of 71-yo me in the app.


Nope, that ain’t more like. No Uncanny Valley here, an obviously corrected photo like all the others.

What happens, then, when we take the pic of Gavin Newsom from the post up top? Take a look.


The only difference I can see in the AI version is sharper focus. For me this is the real McCoy of the Uncanny Valley, only I don’t feel the creeps, like I do when I see one of Samuel Jackson's recent Capitol One ads on TV. I know it’s him but it isn’t him. Here, it’s as if Gavin Newsom is himself an AI construct somehow walking out here among all us real people. That would at least account for his seeming total absence of self-consciousness about what an ass he has become in the public sphere. He doesn’t know that he’s an absurd and grotesque incompetent because that datum has not been programmed into his operating system.

Please tell me if I’m wrong. I’m probably too close to all this stuff by now…

Here’s his AI animated self.

Here he is not reading…

And here’s mine.










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