'Your Outie Is ...': My Own Surreal Journey with an AI Version of Myself

I got a glimpse of what it's like to have a "Severance"-style alter ego. Beware the hagiographic version of yourself who is inevitably coming to an internet search near you.

It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.

I was Googling around, looking for news hits to add to my author website, which I do every once in a while, because I am both terrible at keeping track of my books’ press coverage and also because I refuse to keep a Google alert on my name. One should not be randomly assaulted by people saying nice or mean things about one on a daily basis. This time, I noticed an odd image pop up: It was like an avatar version of one of my author photos on what looked like a (very bad) book cover. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong: The Biography, it said, by David G. Lee.

At the risk of stating the obvious: It’s very strange that someone would write a biography of me, even a very short 44-page one. This appeared to be the mild-mannered-author version of an unauthorized celebrity bio: “Ready to explore the amazing life story of pop culture icon Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, whose works have enthralled audiences for years? This wonderfully written and painstakingly researched biography allows you to delve into the life and work of a groundbreaking novelist, cultural critic, and journalist.” Despite how much I want to believe that I am a “pop culture icon … whose works have enthralled audiences for years,” I’m sorry to tell you that there are reasons to suspect that not all of this information is accurate.

Spoiler: This biography is not painstakingly researched. It is actually shockingly un-painstakingly researched. But we’ll get to that.

Even before I could see what was inside this “book,” in just the first 30 seconds or so of adjusting to its existence, I felt a dizzying rush of conflicting emotions: flattered, confused, skeptical, violated, worried, angry. But mostly, of course, dying to see what was inside. It suddenly occurred to me that I was getting a tiny glimpse of what it might be like to be one of the characters on Severance, the ones whose consciousness is split in two so that each half of their “selves” don’t know what the other is up to.

It turns out my “biography” comes as part of a larger wave of AI scam books on Amazon trying to suck up every last cent they can for as little effort as possible. Last year, tech journalist Kara Swisher noticed copycat versions of her memoir, Burn Book, popping up—essentially bad summaries of what she’d written. But I am not Kara Swisher, which is what makes my experience even more shocking. What I realized from this incident is that all of us have a better chance than ever at being a minor celebrity. Instead of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, in the future, each of us could be minorly famous … forever. But the information circulating about us will be mostly what’s known as “AI slop.”

There is something both complimentary and invasive about learning that there is an AI-generated biography about yourself. I write books about celebrities for a living, and this gave me a new appreciation of what it must feel like for them when I’m digging around in their pasts, even though I have the best of intentions, and am focusing on some of their most seminal works.

This “book” about me starts out in facts: I was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs and earned a journalism degree from Northwestern. It goes awry more quickly than I would have expected given the information I know is out there about myself.

It states my birth year as 1975, which is close but three days off: I was born on Dec. 29, 1974. Then things get truly crazy. It names my mother as Michiko Armstrong, who taught Japanese language and culture at DePaul University, and my father as David Armstrong, a professor of English literature at Loyola University. It says I’m married to a man I met at Northwestern University and have two teenage sons. We move a lot for my job, it says, though it doesn’t say where we’ve lived. We did, however, apparently go to India so that I could research my book When Women Invented Television, which is about pioneers of American television who never go to India. In perhaps the standout moment of this narrative, one of my sons watched Sex and the City with me and shared his insight that Carrie is actually a hoarder, which I apparently put into my book Sex and the City and Us.

There is literally nothing correct in this entire previous paragraph. I cannot emphasize enough just how wrong all of this information is. And now it’s out in the world in a “meticulously researched” biography, stated with great confidence.

Reading it, however, gives me a feeling of anxiety that goes beyond worries about misinformation. This feels so personal. The alt-Jennifer Keishin Armstrong has lived a life nearly opposite from mine, even though we wrote the same books. She grew up in an academic home, with professor parents who worked in the city. I grew up in a south suburban home with parents who were certainly smart, but had grown up working class and had essentially fought their way into the middle class. My dad served in the Army in Vietnam and attended college on the GI bill; before that he’d been working for the Xerox copy company. He likely wouldn’t have gone to college if it weren’t for being drafted, but that’s where he met my mom. He became a grocery buyer, she became a substitute teacher and then a stay-at-home mom to myself and two siblings. Nobody knew Japanese, and nobody knew anyone who had ever written a book or taught English literature. I had a content childhood, but I find myself oddly envious of this other Jennifer, whom I imagine having more connections and more sophistication than I was afforded. She probably went on multiple trips to Japan! I bet she owns several authentic kimonos.

Yes, I am jealous of fake me.

Her adult life, on the other hand, skews much more traditional than mine. She married an unnamed man from Northwestern—which I almost did, but I cancelled my wedding to my college sweetheart (who actually did have a name). I’ve been with my partner for 15 years, but we’ve chosen to remain unmarried. And we don’t have any children, just a dwarf hamster named Sojourner who chatters a lot but does not have any opinions about Sex and the City (or at least any that I can understand). I find myself in the odd position of trying to theorize about this other life trajectory: Did she crave a more traditional family structure after being raised by bohemian academics? Did she want children because she was an only child? Why am I so interested in this nonexistent person?

Perhaps the “author” of this “book,” “David G. Lee,” could answer these questions. But if you click on this name on Amazon, an action that should lead you to his other works, it only leads to books like Successful Manager’s Handbook, which lists someone with that fairly undistinctive name among seven co-authors, and a couple of other unrelated books whose multiple authors include variants on his name, like a David W. Hall and a Meredith G. Kline. A general Google search yields only a dancer/choreographer, an arts administrator, and a physical therapist who share this name. It’s almost impressive that someone could come up with a name that’s so generic and untraceable. (I’m stymied as to how else to figure out who is truly responsible here, so if anyone has suggestions, let me know!)

It's striking how plausible the facts of my fake biography can seem if you only vaguely know who I am but do not actually know me. The AI picked up that I’m from the Chicago area, so it put my fake professor parents at real Chicago institutions. I write books for a living, so academic parents seem like a good guess. I have a part-Japanese name—the Keishin—so why not a Japanese mom? Except, of course, that my Japanese name comes from my Zen Buddhism teacher, not from my parents.

This all worries me because it’s reasonable for a casual reader to believe this is all true. It has also made me even more wary of every piece of AI content I encounter. I haven’t even gotten into the more minor errors, like the “fact” that I was a senior editor at something called Dollars & Sense magazine (a real thing, I guess), and that my book Seinfeldia (real) came out in 2013 (no, 2016, such an easy fact for an AI to look up). Oh, and I also somehow wrote a book called Making Oprah: The Story of Symbol Technologies and America’s First African American Self-Made Billionaire, which is both a terrible subtitle (what are “symbol technologies”?) and a book I wish I really did write.

We can get lost in the fake details of it all, and it’s kind-of fun to do so, but what strikes me most about this situation is that I am a relatively normal person. The only thing that attracted this treatment is that I have a public-facing job that could make me of moderate passing interest to people who are relative strangers to me—i.e., people who have read my books, but whom I have not personally met. It’s likely not long until someone starts a business generating on-demand AI hagiographies of literally anyone. And the main market for them will be … the people whom they are about, though they’ll probably want a more accurate depiction of themselves.

I’ve been thinking about my alternate self while watching the new season of Severance. The show is about a group of people who have had a procedure that separates their work selves from their personal selves. Last season, one of the ways we saw the company try to cheer workers up inside was to read them flattering statements about their “outies.” The wellness staffer tells Irving (John Turturro), for instance: “Your outie is generous. Your outie is fond of music and owns many records. Your outie is a friend to children and to the elderly and the insane. Your outie is strong and helped someone lift a heavy object. Your outie attends many dances and is popular among the other attendees. Your outie likes films and owns a machine that can play them. Your outie is splendid and can swim gracefully and well.”

At the beginning of this current season, the main character, depressed widower Mark (Adam Scott), is on the verge of quitting. His manager lures him back by telling him how wonderful his innie is, how happy he is, and how he has even found love on the inside. As viewers, we know that this is at least somewhat true, whereas we have no idea if what Irving heard about himself is true. (I would guess not. And doesn’t it seem all but AI-generated?) But the larger point is that we like hearing good things about ourselves, even alternate versions of ourselves that we don’t have direct knowledge about.

Reading about my AI biography self is little like that. She feels like a plausible version of me in some other timeline. At moments our lives converge, in where we’ve lived, where we went to college, the books we write. I’m intrigued by, and happy for, her, even though I know she doesn’t exist.

It’s funny that this all started with me looking for press hits about myself because I don’t want to read what people are saying about me on the internet on a daily basis.

The section of this faux biography on my “legacy” begins as follows: “It is impossible to dispute Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s reputation as a pop culture analyst. She has given the study of television and media a new angle through her perceptive and engaging writing, taking it from lighthearted to serious academic without sacrificing its irreverence or sense of fun.”

I want to agree with this. I want to believe it. But how can I, when this got everything else so wrong?

Who is my outie, anyway?

I love the meme going around where people imagine finding out their outie is horrible:

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