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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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I have no clue if this fits the Culture War banner: but lately, I have been feeding my LLM pictures of my friends and colleagues, asking the LLM to build archetype sets of their supposed personalities based on the countenance of their faces and their overall demeanor. My main tool is ChatGPT, surprisingly my favorite one out of the entire coterie of the competitive Silicon Valley releases, despite its Teutonically autistic Modus operandi. Insofar, GPT has managed to be quite accurate about these people that I personally know, once it has built its personality archetype basis for the person, I will ask it questions about how the supposed individual will approach ethical dilemmas and life decisions in general. It has accurately guessed which ones of the friend group are in relationships, what kind of partners they attract and how many children they wish to have/plan to have/already have. It even guessed which one of my friends is going to head for fertility insurance treatments like egg freezing etc. GPT accurately picked up on the eternal Peter Pan/Puer Aeternus friend in the group and his weird approach to romance, mainly his restlessness and inability to process anything other than momentary thrill. I then proceeded to ask GPT to match their faces to their anonymous social media profiles, which it did with surprising accuracy. Note that I was extra careful to not feed it more information than required, it rightfully guessed which ones in the friend group are academically oriented and which ones are internet poisoned beyond repair, the scary questions about political beliefs also turned out to be absolutely correct. GPT managed to identify which ones are the most likely to attend in-person protests, one of them has actually been arrested in real life for being part of those on campus student protests. Once again, note that nothing about these people looks too ''out there'', no dyed hair/piercings/tattoos etc. No ostensible signals of rebellion (even though I don't think any of the aforementioned qualify for displays of rebellious streaks anymore) but they all look like well-mannered UMC adults, no real giveaways in those candid pictures I uploaded. GPT precited that one of my current romantic interests is highly likely to be on Bandcamp, which happens to be true. It even predicted the content creators/blogs/YouTube channels they would all follow, which turns out to be true, as corroborated by previous interactions in the group chat. GPT also happened to accurately guess the one guy is an SSC-RSP-Motte orbiter LOL. So, as it turns out, the book can absolutely be judged by the cover.

So detective work? Anything a human can do, I do think an LLM can do. People are not that good at hiding who they are under scrutiny.

did you actually read that paragraph I wrote? I am feeding it pictures of these people, and asking it to come with personality archetypes based on their pictures alone, and then asking the LLM questions about how the person would approach real-life situations. The LLM even guessed which one in the friend group has experimented with polyamory. Note that I made sure to not feed any additional information except a simple picture with no obvious giveaways featured, all my friends look like the average simple adult and we all dress/present rather simply, nothing too flashy and no obvious personality trait leakage is present in our appearance, at least on the first glance. Most strangers would not be able to guess that the individual in question is into polyamorous dynamics, there is no obvious giveaway in their appearance, absolutely nothing that would align with the common stereotypes in media about poly-people, yet the LLM guessed accurately.

I did. And as I pointed out, unless you're like a detective, most people look at other people and don't notice anything. But clearly, detectives do. Investigators do. Police do. Researchers do. Scientists do. They are trained to pick up on details and infer information that normal people don't. And training meant written down and was probably part of LLM training data. So yes, I am not surprised that LLMs know things about people based purely on images.

and doesn't that induce a 1984-esque scare within you? it can accurately guess your opinion on pretty much every topic out there, taboo ones, political issues or even something as frivolous as opinions on pop-culture debates, all using a simple picture. I will be using this on Hinge-matches next

Think of what it will be able to do in 6 months to a years time. I do think there is something to the position of: "we already have AGI we just don't know it yet".

here though I am busy asking it some real dumbfuck questions like ''what do they think about body hair?'' or ''will xyz stay with their broke boyfriend?'' GPT has been surprisingly accurate with it's lens of perception, it said that xyz would indeed be loyal to their broke boyfriend during transitory periods but would not stay with someone who's default orientation is being a bum