I was frame mogged
Adventures in the public domain.
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Last week, one night before bed, I heard my husband say my name. He was looking at his phone; he sounded so unnerved that for a moment, I thought I was about to get some very bad news. But what he showed me was not tragic, but deeply weird: It was a screenshot, sent in a text from a former roommate, showing a picture frame on Etsy.
I don’t often post pictures of myself on Embedded, so just in case it’s not clear: On the right? That’s me. And my husband. Posing in a photobooth for a picture I shared on Instagram in 2023.
How had it gone from there into the sample frame of a UK-based frame company? Or to be more precise: sample frames?
When we went to the brand’s website, we were in the main header image:
My first thought was that someone I knew had to be behind this. But after investigating the company’s Instagram, I didn’t uncover any connections between us. I tried to reverse image-search the other photo booth pictures the company used for clues, but apparently Google image search has been “optimized” for shopping, and while it can show you where to buy a sweatshirt, it’s basically now useless for finding original images (it told me my photo booth picture didn’t exist).
I decided to email the brand, though I was scared of spooking them—I didn’t want to wake up the next morning and find all traces of my picture removed and not be able to write about it. But I was desperate to know how this had all played out.
While I was worried that there was something nefarious afoot—maybe the photo booth company was selling all the images it took?—it turns out that there wasn’t any grand conspiracy. The people at the brand had simply Googled photo booth photos, and mine showed up.
Turns out, this was all Embedded’s fault. In 2023, I wrote about a website that tracks working film photo booths around the world and used this same picture as the social image. Now, if you Google image search “film photo booth,” we are the second result.
This is not the first time the internet has made me the face of something without my knowledge. Pre-AI, I provided an example of “breakup haircut” in Google:
My friend Hannah also informed me that an Embedded image is the first result for “go piss girl.” An honor!
It’s easy to forget that what we’re posting on Instagram or writing on Twitter is, for all intents and purposes, in the public domain. And if you happen to come across it being repurposed by someone else, that’s a way of learning about yourself from an outsider’s perspective.
The person I reached at the frame brand said that me and my husband’s picture was a “a lovely, characterful image” that they felt “would be great to show off our product.” I’m not disagreeing, but I also know that the photo was taken after I had dragged my husband to two other film photo booths around lower Manhattan that had ended up not working, and as a result, we were both at the end of our ropes (or he was, at least).
I’m not the only person this kind of thing has happened to, and my story is more sweet than it is disturbing. In 2024, writer Sara Burningham came across an image that she knew was AI not just because of the subjects’ weird hands and plasticy-looking faces, but because one of the men pictured was of her father. He had been dead for 14 years. Then there’s Wired’s Amanda Florian, who wrote in 2023 about how her face was almost certainly deepfaked into a Chinese camping stove ad. What we own, even of our own selves, is becoming startlingly uncertain.
I don’t mind at all that my husband and I are the faces of a frame that 20 people currently have in their carts on Etsy. The company offered to take down the image, but I am actually weirdly flattered by it! And it doesn’t hurt that they offered to send me a complimentary frame of my choosing. I think I know the perfect photo for it…