In an age where artificial intelligence is becoming more and more prominent, we must become weary of those who walk among us. Who is real, and who is a machine? As the decades go by, it will become more difficult to answer this question. Your best friend could be a cyborg and you would never know.

(My blog makes the image seem like it’s squished together. Right click it and choose “View Image” to see the right proportions.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

This activity was done for the “For the Remix” assignment. I made this image using a portrait from Jonathan Worth’s website, Creative Commons images of a metal skull and bar code, and GIMP. First I turned the whole image’s color to a silvery-blue to try to mimic the dramatic lighting found in a Terminator movie or something. Then I selected half of his face, cut it away, and pasted it as a new layer. Making it a new layer allowed me to freely rotate the piece without messing up the rest of the face. When I rotated it, I wanted it to look like half of his face was breaking open like a pinata to reveal his metal skull.

The skull was another layer in itself and it was was moved to fit directly under the face layer. The problem I had with this was that the skull was an image that faced directly forward while the face was turned at an angle. I tried to fix this by slightly warping the skull to turn it a bit. The red eye inside the skull was done with a series of fuzzy brushes and Gaussian blurs (to add the glow) Meanwhile the other eye was red to show that there was also a red light behind that part of the face too.  Finally, I added the bar code to his forehead to show that he is just a product; an android that could be bought at an AI industry. (this layer’s opacity had to be turned down to make it look like it was naturally printed into is forehead.)

I had ALOT of fun making this and I was impressed with how it turned out. My first idea was to open his head and inside there was going to be the inside of an apple, symbolizing knowledge. But that would’ve been too easy and I went with something much cooler. I mean, would you rather have a fruit for a brain or an advanced piece of technology that could grant you the power to do unimaginable things? Yeah, I thought so.