u/charlottemason_mama

I’m building back up to getting after W3 after time off for injury/almost injury. I did 90s intervals Monday and Wednesday. Was going to do at least one more run with 90s intervals before officially going after the W3 schedule.

Today would be my run day (I’m going to be going contra dancing tomorrow so I didn’t want to do both in one day since contra is a lot of cardio) but I woke up feeling inflamed and gross. I have autoimmune issues and food sometimes knocks me sideways and I ate a couple of things yesterday that might not be sitting right and could be causing inflammation. The stomach wants what the stomach wants.

So, should I go out running today anyway and see what I can do or see if eating clean today makes tomorrow better and run then?

Ladies, how do you make sure you’re staying safe when you go out on runs?

I took my large dog with me in the beginning because he needs exercise and I have mostly been going out after dark when my parenting duties were done. But as I started running more and longer he was trying to run in front of me (edited for clarity: literally trying to run in front of my feet where I am trying to run) and I was having to hold him tightly with my inflamed shoulder to keep him from tripping me because it’s on the side I want him to walk on. I know we need to work on training to run, but I’m mentally overloaded right now and just want to be able to get out and run.

I have started going out before dark as often as possible lately, for visibility and safety, and so I’m not showering at 11 pm. I live on a busy road, but a quarter mile down from my driveway is a street that goes into a quiet neighborhood and I go run there. I have marked off distances so I can easily choose how far I’m going. To get to this neighborhood I go past the police/fire station and some city buildings they use for public works.

Last night I was doing my warm-up (I walk/dance the quarter mile to the turn into the quiet neighborhood then start my intervals) a guy pulled into the turn lane in front of the police station and did a u-turn. He pulled into the public works driveway and waited for me to pass. My spidey senses tingled, but I didn’t want to assume. I made my turn and got about a block down before he was pulling alongside me in the street.

I didn’t turn my head. I don’t know if he tried talking to me because he was on my deaf side (that ear currently functions at a capacity that makes it worthless for hearing anything but loud noises). I began my first interval and didn’t look back.

A few seconds after I got back to walking I saw his car in my peripheral vision. I walked faster until I couldn’t see him. Thirty seconds later I can see him edging up to be level with me *again*. I pulled my phone out and hit the camera button and hit record and finally looked at him.

I guess he decided I wasn’t going to be worth it because he made up some story about his phone being dead and how he was trying to get to Name of My Town. The major road he pulled a U-y on has banners on every light post. There are more than a dozen signs for things with the town name on them, and he totally turned around in front of the public safety complex and library with the town name on all of them. He knew where he was.

I tell him he’s there. Oh, he needs Main Street. Turn around and go through the light where you turned to follow me and go straight and it’s there several blocks down. Oh okay. He leaves.

I finished my run, but all I could think of was how I should have called the police the first time he came level with me and all the ways it could have gone wrong if I hadn’t been aware of my surroundings and in broad daylight. I listen to music on my Shokz, but I often worry about my hearing impairment leading to safety concerns. Usually I turn my head a lot so my “good” ear (it has slightly diminished hearing) can hear things and I can visually check I’m not being followed on foot.

I’m a single mom, no one is coming running with me, and I have no designated person who is available to text when I’m on a run and when I get back to know if anything has happened. What are you doing for safety, ladies?

It’s going to take me a while to get over feeling unsafe going out to run, even in daylight. My driveway is long, but so boring to run back and forth for 30-40 minutes watching six lanes of traffic go by. I don’t want this to take my joy, but I’m spooked.

Disclaimer: I cannot put the pictures in question on this post - they’re of children, mine and others, and the faces being the most relevant feature I can’t just block them off, though you would be able to see differences in bodies as well. I have shown the photos to several friends and family, and they all agree with my assessment of how big the differences are.

We attend a homeschool extracurricular “co-op” of sorts for things like ballet, band, choir, art, drama, etc. A yearbook is produced every year which, while expensive, is fun to have to remember. Last year I did not pay for individual dance photos because LifeTouch did such a bad job (wrinkled background, bad lighting, etc.). This year they had a co-op mom do the pics. (ETA: this woman is a professional photographer with a website and portfolio, not an amateur.) We didn’t see any of them until the yearbook was released a few weeks ago.

My kids eagerly flipped through the yearbook to find the ballet group photos. They were nicely lit and had a great background and looked wonderful. Except….

My kids didn’t look like themselves.

Kid A is in one class and Kid B is in another. Kid A had one group pic (costume) and Kid B had two (one in costume and one in regular dance wear). Kid B looked like herself in the costume photo, but had obviously been altered in the regular picture - she was slimmer and her nose was different. I had to ask Kid A where she was in the photo because none of the kids in the picture were one I could peg as my own. She pointed to the one on the end and I could see how it bore a slight resemblance to her, but it wasn’t her.

I figured the yearbook company had done the alterations and planned to discuss it with leadership in hopes they would choose a different company next year. Several other moms said their kids looked different, too. One said her daughter was present for pictures but wasn’t in the photo in the yearbook.

Fast forward to two days ago when the group and individual pictures we paid for got delivered to our email. The same images from the yearbook were staring back at me - Stepford versions of my kids that were eerily similar but not actually the same people. Very uncanny valley. The individual pictures looked fine, if a bit over processed.

I immediately emailed the ballet assistant about the issue (my kids don’t look like themselves and parents weren’t told their children would be fed into a generative AI computer network that isn’t private and can store their images to train the bot and/or make new image requests, including degrading images) with side by side comparisons of my children’s real faces and the versions in the picture, and she said she forwarded my email to the photographer.

The photographer comes back with “it’s angles and lighting in this set” and “we had such trouble with the bad pictures last year and AI solved the problem so I used it to touch up where the backdrop didn’t cover everything and I checked many of the photos, but I don’t know all the girls personally so I may have missed something.” She says she’ll send me the unedited photos.

I knew my kids had been massively altered, but I was not prepared to see the unedited photos. Not only are there no places where the backdrop is gaping (also, generative fill in Photoshop is a thing) but every single child has been altered in some way in each photo. AI made them all the same height, shortened their teacher, made many of them slimmer, changed faces just a little to make them more “cute” or make their smile perfect. The group photos from my daughters’ classes do not represent reality, which is the whole point of a yearbook, but a computer-created fantasy that reflects an aesthetic value system that rejected who they are in favor of something “better.” And this woman didn’t even check her work to notice.

So my kids are in the yearbook, along with all these other girls, not as themselves, but as a fantasy created by an algorithm that didn’t find them cute enough. I paid for pictures (and a yearbook) that aren’t of my actual children and my concerns were downplayed by the photographer. She has not acknowledged that she has breached privacy by not informing parents of her editing methods, and she has only kind of apologized for not noticing that my kids were changed into different people.

I have strong feelings about AI. It’s my personal choice to avoid using it as much as possible and to not put my children’s images into any model that could use it for training or save their images to be used for other things. If you don’t agree, that’s fine - you do you. But I do feel like parents should have been told their children’s images were going to be put into a computer network that is hackable and not private. I have not received any information on whether the photographer’s account on whatever engine she used is set to not feed content into the training of the bot.

I’m very upset and resisting the urge to raise hell. I’ve emailed the director to ask for a meeting on Monday (our last day of the semester), but what I really want to do is blast this to the parent Facebook group. I wont do it, but I am hopping mad about this.