Hi, I was hoping someone at Facebook Support could potentially help me with this issue.
Earlier this week, I uploaded a lovely set of wedding photos to my Facebook only to receive this message:
“Your photos have been labeled as AI-generated and may be deprioritized in feeds.”
Excuse me? What the hell? These were pictures from my actual wedding. With my actual wife. In an actual barn that cost four thousand dollars more than we budgeted.
I understand that Facebook is trying to combat the rise of deepfakes and synthetic influencers, but I can assure you that those photos are 100 percent real and were professionally shot by a guy named Trevor, who has an unusually long ponytail and still uses a Canon DSLR.
At least, the whole marriage experience felt very real… I think?
So, imagine my confusion—and, frankly, existential dread—when Facebook flagged the images.
At first, I laughed. Haha, very funny, Zuckster. Your ineffective AI filter was probably just thrown off by my groomsmen’s unusually smooth heads, or the way my new bride’s veil sort of hovered unnaturally above her shoulder like it hadn’t been rendered in properly. Whatever. Just a trick of the camera or a forced-perspective thing, right?
But then I looked closer.
Has my father always had six fingers on each hand?
Is it possible I never noticed before?
And just over his shoulder during the best-man toast, who is that crying soldier holding a sign that reads “Today is my birthday, please like.” No disrespect to our troops, but I certainly don’t recall inviting that guy.
This sent me down an uncanny-valley rabbit hole as I desperately combed through old photos, searching for some confirmation of the reality of my reality. But to my horror, I found none. Every pic from past Tough Mudder marathons looked like a fleshy Rubik’s Cube of misplaced eyes and thumbs sticking out of places they had no business sticking out of. Every college Halloween party selfie looked like a Cronenbergian pasta dish.
I went all the way back to a video of my valedictorian speech in high school. But halfway through, the video looped and started again, like someone had run out of prompt tokens.
Full-blown panic had set in. I checked the mirror and splashed cold water on my face. I studied myself. All my ones and zeroes were seemingly in the right place.
I mean, my facial features. Because I’m a real, organic person. I must be.
Maybe my wife could reassure me and rescue me from the brink of AI psychosis? She always has the right answers to my queries. And if she’s not sure, she’ll pull sources from various places on the web to confirm!
So I texted her, “What was the date of our wedding again?”
She responded, “Certainly—I can help with that! Our wedding was on April 29—the same day that Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines—yet his fleet continued and completed the first global circumnavigation.”
Oh god, so many em dashes. And what kind of twenty-nine-year-old has a historical tidbit like that in their back pocket?
That’s when it hit me. What if Facebook wasn’t wrong? What if it’s not just my wedding, but my whole life, that is AI-generated?
Suddenly, it all makes sense: My oddly symmetrical face. My complete lack of dental records before 2013. The way I reflexively say “As a society, we need to…” whenever I’m nervous.
I thought I was a man with a mortgage and an affinity for IPA beer. But maybe I’m just a large language model wearing khakis.
So I guess… thank you, Facebook? For opening my eyes. Or pixels. Or whatever these are.
And I’d like to close this message with a request:
Please do not delete my account. I may not be real, but my engagement metrics are.
