When I first started making my AI selfie, I thought the main challenge would just be getting the image to look like me. I expected to spend most of my time thinking about facial features, style, or mood. But once I started generating different versions, I realized the process was doing something else too. It was making me think about how digital platforms shape identity in ways that are easy to overlook.
Starting with a Simple Prompt
At first, my prompts were pretty simple, and the results did not feel personal at all. They looked polished, but in a very generic way. They felt more like AI portraits than selfies.
Because of that, I kept revising the prompt and adding details that felt closer to my real life, like an Edmonton winter setting, commuting elements, and a bilingual interface in English and Chinese. I wanted the image to feel less artificial and more connected to the digital spaces I actually move through every day.
What stood out to me most in the final version was not really my face, but the labels around the image. Things like "Location," "Data shared," "Ad targeting," and especially "visa status: newcomer" changed the meaning of the selfie for me. Instead of looking like a normal self-portrait, it started to look more like a profile being sorted and read by a system. That was the point where the image stopped feeling like it was only "me" and started feeling like a version of me that had already been categorized.
The label "newcomer" stayed with me the most. It is not completely wrong, but it still feels too narrow. It reduces a much fuller identity into one category that makes sense to a platform. That part made me think about how often digital systems present people through labels that are easy to track, rather than in ways that actually reflect who they are. In that sense, the selfie did not just represent me. It also showed the gap between personal identity and platform identity.
The bilingual interface mattered to me for a similar reason. It was a small detail, but it added something important to the image. It reflected part of my actual experience, but it also suggested that identity online is shaped by interface design and by assumptions about audience. Even when we make our own choices online, those choices still happen inside systems that organize how we appear.
Changing my earlier paper into a blog post also made me write about the selfie differently. In the paper, I focused more on formal analysis and academic language. Here, I paid more attention to what actually felt strange or uncomfortable in the image and why those details mattered. Writing it as a blog post made the experience feel more immediate. It also reminded me that format changes the message. A paper lets me analyze the selfie from more of a distance, while a blog post feels closer to the everyday experience of living with these kinds of digital systems.
By the end of this project, I was thinking about selfies a little differently. I used to see them mainly as personal images, but now I think they also show how identity gets shaped by platforms, interfaces, and data. My AI selfie was supposed to represent me, but in the end it also revealed how easily a person can be turned into something legible, searchable, and categorized online.
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