Remembering Mental Health, and the Importance of Being Earnest

One of my favorite comments when I started first appearing in media around the dawn of the Gamestop saga (ages ago in internet time, last month in reality) was along the lines of “I honestly didn’t believe you were a real person, I thought your photo was generated from https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/”. It was innocent and on its face almost a compliment; throughout my life, and especially since I started in trading communities, for one reason or another I was always compared to an AI, usually in an assumably-complimentary way.