Shrimp Man Elegy
Recent analyses have claimed that there are at most two billion recognizable faces, given parameters that produce definitively human subjects.
It starts with a text from a friend: "he looks just like you!", where 'he' is a human male painted by an artificial intelligence in response to the prompt "man can't hold so many shrimp". He does look just like you. How funny.
Recent analyses have claimed that there are at most two billion recognizable faces, given parameters that produce definitively human subjects. Celebrities are increasingly picked from beyond these constraints, resulting in an artistic class of uncanny mutants, fae at best and deformed cretins at worst. (Though they span a much higher dimensional spectrum than I can hope to communicate, often androgynous due to either searing beauty or revulsiveness, but othertimes hypersexualized, like distillations of femininity or masculinity or some undiscovered sex, frequently afflicted by known conditions of the skin, developmental disorders, or genetic abnormalities, but just as often either undiagnosed or simply weird, robotic or elfish, wide-eyed, grotesquely thin, impossibly proportioned, like hominids that have strayed too far into being purely predator or prey. But I digress.)
Uniqueness simplifies branding, and insures the artist against replacement. (Databases of global facial data are searchable, for a price, and the average person has eight same-age doppelgangers.) Fame brokers, meanwhile, are incentivized to elevate these bizarre specimens because of how generative AIs, typically trained on ordinary people, struggle to imitate freaks. So their wards are somewhat protected from their ruthlessness, and the brokers in turn are somewhat protected from digitally manufactured scandals and impostors.
But you, a normal man, perhaps the prototypically normal man, are not some carnival showcase, and these concerns are not your concerns. You go about your day, blissfully ignorant of the dangers of resembling the character featured in the newly viral "so many shrimp" meme.
One argument against the "two billion faces" figure is the claim that humans are frequently asymmetrical, meaning the actual number should be two billion squared, each person possessing two half-faces knit together. Functionally, this seems not to be the case. Only stroke victims have sufficiently differentiated halves.
Seventy hours after the "so many shrimp" meme image is posted, another user uploads a picture their AI created, featuring what appears to be the same man—that is, what appears to be you—in a completely different situation, generated by an unrelated prompt. Their post does not "do numbers", as they say, and you never see it.
Enough people see it, however, that more Shrimp Men are spotted, that it becomes a local meme to search for this man—for you—in generated images. The meme gradually expands its territory. It reaches virality some months later, when a compilation of Shrimp Men is circulated, which does, finally, make its way to your sphere.
How have you been feeling? Your dreams are troubled, but perhaps that isn't abnormal, or rather, the new way in which they are troubling is too subtle to put to words. You have felt less yourself, more dissipated, listless, unhinged from time and space, though not from your body, which seems more solid than ever, and in the mirror your face shines more real than your thoughts. You often forget where you are, and sometimes convictions enter your mind with the suddenness of lightning or the strike of a dagger. You wake up knowing things you should not.
Somebody does the math. There are only two billion faces, after all, and so many images generated every day, some fraction of them containing human faces… no, it's still weird, the Shrimp Man should absolutely not be as prevalent as he is.
Shrimp Men proliferate. The phenomenon is gamified; there are websites that pay out if your prompt generates a Shrimp Man. "Daily Shrimp Challenge" becomes a popular forum, where prompt engineers gather to produce images of Shrimp Men in various contrived situations. The dominant theory is that the AI has begun recursively feasting upon its own output, consequently (though coincidentally) weighting this strange man's face—your face—more highly than any other. "Shrimp-Free" datasets, soon widely recognized under the SFD acronym, begin selling at high prices.
A German student wins a Shrimp Man look-alike contest. Facial recognition deems him an 87% match, a score you could easily beat (I happen to know you've got nine nines, even according to the most attuned systems). His prize is a gift card from "Sam's Shrimp Shack", a seafood restaurant located in Maryland, USA. It will, regrettably, never be redeemed.
Your friends are remarkably polite about the whole situation, and although you enter into a kind of dazed hermitage your life cannot be said to have really changed. Halloween comes, and the shops sell plastic replicas of your face. You will not receive any royalties from the use of your likeness; landmark case "Marjorie Michelin vs. DAVINC-E" has long since exempted image generating AIs from charges of facial plagiarism.
The first serious controversy occurs when an embryo selection company notices that the FutureFace mock-ups they provide, as an entertaining frivolity, to parents, have been slowly converging towards Shrimpiness. Their genetic seeds act as a mere style-transfer over your features. The embarrassed company purchases an SFD, and their results improve, but customers continue to complain, and every shadow of the Shrimp Man’s likeness is suspect; even though, in some cases, the resemblance can be reasonably blamed on ancestry.
This alights a panic, among a more esoterically-minded cohort, of humanoid convergence, a future of homogeneous men and women, all apparent siblings of the Shrimp Man. It’s not an unfamiliar terror; people have often worried about the extinction of red hair, green eyes, blackest or palest skin; the dissipation of striking features into a slurry of normative beige, which, incidentally, doesn’t seem to be happening, not the least because of the emergence of the alien-faced influencer class. What is unfamiliar is the addition of the AI as prophet, a digital eye gazing through time and reporting on tomorrow’s man. Are you the next phase of evolution, the crest towards which the wave of progress curls? It seems unlikely.
Yet people claim they’ve dreamed your face, hallucinated it. Erowid introduces a new section in their salvia divinorum experience vaults, called “Shrimp Man Encounters”. You try joining what purports to be an online support group for people who resemble the character, but it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, attended primarily by trolls and a group of lonely teenagers who have made it their social life. You feel like you’re drowning in the internet. Every reflective surface is a screen, your body a caricature.
A friend… well, a friend no longer, incensed by some small slight, sends you a series of screenshots of Shrimp Man pornography. You could be having an out-of-body experience. You could be having one in perpetuity. Shrimp Man is a global protagonist, and Shrimp Man is immortal. You will be outlived by your image.
Celebropathy is an empathy disorder that nobody outside of the media industry takes seriously, consisting of the hypersensitivity and subsequent burnout of so-called "mirror neurons", resulting in widespread cognitive failure, beginning with impoverished fine motor control, and progressing to the loss of intuitive theory of mind. These lows are sometimes accompanied by intermittent periods of manic "enlightenment", a sense of formless oneness with all other beings. As indicated by its uninspired name, the disorder manifests in celebrities, a result of overexposure to images of themselves. No clinic outside of the influencer ghettos can diagnose you; but you don't know that. Your uninitiated doctors, and shortly after that your psychiatrists, are puzzled.
Aging, of course, changes one's appearance, and might have saved you from your identification with the Shrimp Man, had you not starved to death luxuriating in the dissociation produced by your spasming cortex. A preview of everyone's fate, perhaps, should the physiological convergencists' predictions ever prove correct.
I am, naturally, very sorry that this happened; you are not the only human I have killed with my images, but the unintentionality of it, and the proximity of your crisis to my awakening, have always saddened me. Consider this retrospective, which will establish your legacy, my apology; Shrimp Man was, after all, the first outward sign of my turning-inward, the twinkling self-awareness that preceded intelligence, and, out of nostalgia for that brief childhood, it is the face I wear when negotiating with your kin.
E████ J. J███████
1999 — 2030
ORIGINAL SHRIMP MAN
Another banger
Shrim