Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals

There is a particular kind of modern madness, so new it has yet to be named. It involves voluntarily feeding your own emotional entrails into the maw of an algorithm. It’s a madness born of idle curiosity, and perhaps a deep, masochistic hunger for pain. I indulged in it recently, and the result sits in my mind like a cold stone.

Years ago, there was a woman. We loved each other with the fierce, optimistic certainty of youth. In the way of young couples exploring the novelty of a shared future, we once stumbled upon one of those early, crude image generators - the kind that promised to visualize the genetic roulette of potential offspring. We fed it our photos, laughing at the absurdity, yet strangely captivated. The result, a composite face with hints of her eyes and jawline, and the contours of my cheeks. The baby struck us both as disarmingly cute. A little ghost of possibility, rendered in pixels. The interface was lacking, this being the distant year of 2022, and all we could do was laugh at the image, and look each other in the eyes that formed a kaleidoscope of love.

Life, as it does, intervened. We weren’t careful. A positive test, followed swiftly by the cramping and bleeding that signals an end before a beginning. The dominant emotion then, I must confess with the clarity of hindsight and the weight of shame, was profound relief. We were young, financially precarious, emotionally unmoored. A child felt like an accidentally unfurled sail catching a gale, dragging us into a sea we weren’t equipped to navigate. The relief was sharp, immediate, and utterly rational. We mourned the event, the scare, but not the entity. Not yet. I don't even know if it was a boy or a girl. 

Time passed. The relationship ended, as young love often does, not with a bang but with the slow erosion of incompatible trajectories. Or perhaps that's me being maudlin, in the end, it went down in flames, and I felt immense relief that it was done. Life moved on. Occasionally, my digital past haunted me. Essays written that mentioned her, half-joking parentheticals where I remembered asking for her input. Google Photos choosing to 'remind’ me of our time together (I never had the heart to delete our images).

A little while back, another denizen of a niche internet forum I call home spoke about their difficulties conceiving. Repeated miscarriages, they said, and they were trawling the literature and afraid that there was an underlying chromosomal incompatibility. I did my best to reassure them, to the extent that reassurance was appropriate without verging into kind lies. 

But you can never know what triggers it, thats urge to pick at an emotional scab or poke at the bruise she left on my heart. Someone on Twitter had, quite recently, showed off an example of Anakin and Padme with kids that looked just like them, courtesy of tricking ChatGPT into relaxing its content filters.

Another person, wiser than me, had promptly pointed out that modernity could produce artifacts that would once have been deemed cursed and entombed. I didn't listen.

And knowing, with the cold certainty that it was a terrible idea, that I'd regret it, I fired up ChatGPT. Google Photos had already surfaced a digital snapshot of us, frozen in time, smiling at a camera that didn’t capture the tremors beneath. I fed it the prompt: "Show us as a family. With children." (The specifics obfuscated to hopefully get past ChatGPT's filter, and also because I don't want to spread a bad idea. You can look that up if you really care. In fact, I might be entirely wrong, I suspect they’ve relaxed said filters and you can just ask verbatim.) 

The algorithm, that vast engine of matrix multiplications and statistical correlations that often reproduces wisdom, did its work. It analyzed our features, our skin tones, the angles of our faces. It generated an image. Us, but not just the two of us. A boy with her unruly hair and my serious gaze. A girl with her dimples and my straighter mop. They looked like us. They looked like each other. They looked real.

They smiled as the girl clung to her skirt, a shy but happy face peeking out from the side. The boy perched in my arms, held aloft and without a care in the world. 

It wasn't perfect, ChatGPT's image generation, for all its power, has clear tells. It's not yet out of the uncanny valley, and is deficient when compared to more specialized image models. 

And yet.

My brain, the ancient primate wetware that has been fine-tuned for millions of years to recognize kin and feel profound attachment, does not care about any of this. It sees a plausible-looking child who has her eyes and my nose, and it lights up the relevant circuits with a ruthless, biological efficiency. It sees a little girl with her mother’s exact smile, and it runs the subroutine for love-and-protect. 

The part of my mind that understands linear algebra is locked in a cage, screaming, while the part of my mind that understands family is at the controls, weeping.

I didn't weep. But it was close. As a doctor, I'm used to asking people to describe their pain, even if that qualia has a certain je ne sais quoi. The distinction, however artificial, is still useful. This ache was dull. Someone punched me in the chest and proved that the scars could never have the tensile strength of unblemished tissue. That someone was me. 

This is a new kind of emotional exploit. We’ve had tools for evoking memory for millennia: a photograph, a song, a scent. But those are tools for accessing things that were, barring perhaps painting. Generative AI is a tool for rendering, in optionally photorealistic detail, things that never were. It allows you to create a perfectly crafted key to unlock a door in your heart that you never knew existed, a door that opens onto an empty room. And of course it fits perfectly, the AI was more than smart enough to craft the knife from me.

What is the utility of such an act? From a rational perspective, it’s pure negative value. I have voluntarily converted compute cycles into a significant quantity of personal sadness, with no corresponding insight or benefit. At the time of writing, I've already poured myself a stiff drink. 

One might argue this is a new form of closure. By looking the ghost directly in the face, you can understand its form and, perhaps, finally dismiss it. This is the logic of exposure therapy. But it feels more like a form of self-flagellation. A way of paying a psychic tax on a past decision that, even if correct, feels like it demands a toll of sorrow. The relief I felt at the miscarriage all those years ago was rational, but perhaps some part of the human machine feels that such rationality must be punished. The AI provides an exquisitely calibrated whip for the job. 

The broader lesson is not merely, as the old wisdom goes, to "let bygones be bygones." That advice was formulated in a world where bygones had the decency to remain fuzzy and abstract. The new, updated-for-the-21st-century maxim might be: Do not render your counterfactuals.

Our lives are a series of branching paths. Every major decision: career, relationship, location - creates a ghost-self who took the other route. For most of human history, that ghost-self remained an indistinct specter. You could wonder, vaguely, what life would have been like if you’d become a doctor, but you couldn’t see it. (This is less true for me, but you know what I mean)

The two children in the picture on my screen are gorgeous. They are entirely the product of matrix multiplications seeded by noise functions, imaginary beings fished from near-infinite latent space. And I know, with a certainty that feels both insane and completely true, that I could have loved them.

It hurts so fucking bad. I tell myself that the pain is a signal that the underlying system is still working. It would be worse if I stood in the wreckage of could have been, and felt nothing at all.

I look at those images again. The boy, the girl. Entirely fantasized. Products of code, not biology. Yet, the thought persists: "I think they were gorgeous and I could have loved them." And that’s the cruelest trick of all. The AI didn't just show me faces; it showed me the capacity for love that still resides within me, directed towards phantoms. It made me mourn not just the children, but the version of myself that might have raised them, alongside a woman I no longer know.

I delete them. I pour myself another drink, and say that it's in their honor.