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Today is My Daughter’s Should-Be 22nd Birthday
I want to feed Ana’s 15-year-old face into the magical AI image generator and demand that it show me what she would look like now.
Yesterday I turned to my husband and asked if he thought there was an AI tool that could age someone in a photograph. He’d started answering before thinking about why a question like that had occurred to me.
“You probably have to pay for a tool like that,” Jim began. He’d been fascinated with AI art generation tools lately, experimenting with making landscapes, warped animals, and almost-human figures. He knew more about the tools than I did. “The free tools won’t cut it if you want something decent,” he’d continued. But then he stopped speaking and gave me a hard look, realization dawning.
“Don’t do it,” he said. “It’s not real.”
I nodded, looked at my feet, and tried to let go over the overwhelming urge I had to upload a photo of my daughter, Ana at age 15 — the age she’ll never outgrow.
Ana should’ve (would’ve, could’ve) turned 22 today, if not for the cancer. She was born on May 16th, 2001 — a perfectly ordinary Wednesday for most people. At 8:08 pm, on that normal weekday when people were getting their kids ready for bed and cleaning up the…
