Never feel like other people are more successful than you: live a totally fabricated life of lies with the help of an “AI-generated images” digital photo frame!

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The Issue:

One counterintuitive phenomenon is that people sometimes get depressed during the holidays when they realize that their real family and friends don’t match the idealized holiday expectations that have been set by TV and movies.

Proposal:

Since TV and movies present a “fake” life that can’t possibly be achieved in reality, the solution is to modify your memories of your own life to be equally fake. 

This can be done in many ways, but here we focus on photos. Normally, a person might have a photo of (say) their family on their desk or hanging on a wall, or a photo of a relative’s college graduation, or a photo of a person and their friends on a vacation. The problem is as follows:

  • EXPECTATION: A person has a photo of their successful son, graduating from medical school.
  • REALITY: The person’s son dropped out of high school to join an alpaca-smuggling criminal organization.
  • FICTION: A person has a photo of themselves and their friends hiking to the top of a majestic mountain.
  • REALITY: No one has time off to go on vacation.

The solution is to have a photo frame that is hooked up to an online image-generation program and will generate fake “successful life” images on an as-needed basis.

As seen in Figure 1, we’re able to generate suitable fake-successful-life images by just using the prompts “successful family,” “friends graduating from Harvard,” and “friends celebrating on the moon.” 

Fig. 1: Left: “successful famiily” (the two “i”s are presumably crucial). Middle: Some “Harvevard” graduates. Right: celebrating with your friends on the moon (with another moon in the background, evidently).

Conclusion:

If the people in the photos don’t match your requirements (e.g. presumably you would want to be in your own “successful family” photo), you can either re-generate the image with a different prompt, re-generate the image with some sort of training on specific real photos, or get extensive plastic surgery so that you match the person in the computer-generated image.

PROS: Should increase people’s satisfaction with their own lives and prevent “social media envy” where people become depressed when seeing other people’s unrealistic and highly-curated social media lives.

CONS: None! This is a totally healthy approach to living that has no downsides.

Originally published 2024-12-23.