Contact Work: I'd know your hands anywhere

When AI uses me to make a simulacrum of me and I see it by accident

Last week I was looking through the ad trades and saw a mediocre headline about CMOs. I don’t subscribe to this trade, so I was scrolling past. Until I realized the picture of the CMO was a picture of me.

I was a fractional CMO during the pandemic, but I wasn’t in the press in that role. I zoomed in. The haircut, the glasses, the face, were all mine. But the ears were wrong, and I don’t think I actually look that jowly, do I?

I have a pretty generic look. All my life people have told me I look just like their cousin Jessica, or their best friend from college, or whatever. But my oldest friend Mary Virginia took one look at that image and said, cool, you’re in the magazine. I had to explain to her that it wasn’t me. She’s known me since we were twelve and she thought it was me. She sent it out on her family chat to all her kids, who have known me their whole lives and they all thought it was me.

Are there so few women in the advertising world over fifty that my face is going to show in various permutations every time a CMO of a certain age is called for? Better CMO than generic osteoporosis sufferer in a pharma ad, I suppose. At least I’m too old for anyone to make fake sex tapes of me.

I put a lot of content out into the world, written and spoken. I long ago understood that my content could be scraped, copied, mixed, matched and regurgitated. I’ve had real men steal my work and claim it as their own in the past, now it’ll be man-made AI. It’s a drag, but there isn’t much I can do about it. I’m a writer, so I’m going to keep writing. I like to think my actual writing will have a zip, a spark, a contrariness that will make the ersatz fall short of the genuine.

I found the source of the magazine image, a series of stock photos of an older woman with short gray hair and glasses like mine. She’s short, clearly not me, but she’s wearing the same gray sweater and glasses. But this image is her plus me.

 “If they’d shown your hands I would have known it wasn’t you. I’d recognize your hands anywhere,” Mary Virginia said.

What is it about us that is essential, not replicable? I’ve spent so many hours over the last few years in virtual meetings, virtual coaching sessions, that I got used to that almost uncanny valley. There were executive coaching clients I didn’t meet in person for two years of deep work together during the pandemic. And when I did, finally, meet them, after the inevitable comments about height, there was that human, specific connection. I know what their hands look like, how they sit in a chair, what their walk is like. And it matters.

When my granddaughter was born I learned new terms for things I did with my children when they were babies. We didn’t use the term “contact nap”, but my kids often slept on my chest during the day when they were infants. My son had colic, so he was strapped to my body in a carrier for the first three months of his life, I couldn’t put him down at all without howls of protest. The soundtrack to every shower I took was a shrieking newborn in a bouncy chair on the other side of the shower curtain. I automatically did contact naps with my grandchildren. My daughter has many pictures of me with a tiny baby asleep on my chest. I find an infant on my chest to be a soporific, so I am usually asleep myself in the photos, one arm around the baby cuddled up into my chin.

We’re meant to be face to face. When my executive coaching friends bemoan the fact that coaching will move to AI, when I see movies that depict virtual assistants or therapists as translucent holograms, I think there will always be a place for one real live person sitting across from another real live person.

I’m not bemoaning the convenience of remote work, or suggesting any draconian return to work policies. It’s great that I can coach clients anywhere in the world, and I think remote coaching still has value. What I’m noticing is that we’ve gotten out of the habit of being in person and we should attend to reinvigorating that habit. A number of old work friends and I, in reconnecting over actual coffee in a shared space, have remarked how much more powerful it is to be face to face and how we have lagged in picking that up again, especially those of us who are introverted. Although one former client who I worked with for years, in person and remotely, did look up at me and tell me she always forgets how tall I am.

Those of us who are older, who grew up in a time without the internet, or social media, or dating apps, often look askance at someone who says they are having an intimate relationship with a person they have never met in real life. We believe that romantic and sexual intimacy requires skin to skin contact, at least some of the time. We all know that babies need it. Why should we think that our close work relationships can thrive without the specificity of at least some in-person interactions?

If AI is a threat to some of our jobs, what is our superpower against AI? It’s actual physical presence. The specificity of two people sharing a walk while they try to sort out a complex problem; a group of people in front of an actual whiteboard, sharing a box of TopPot donuts, the dusting of powdered sugar wiped off a hand;  the difficult conversation when you can see one another breathing, watch the hands pleat the sweater in nervous anticipation, the eyes widen.

The animal connection we intuitively understand as necessary to intimate and family relationships still exists at work. We need contact work. We may not be able or interested in connecting in person every day. But let’s try and connect in person when we can, and understand the value of sharing space, breaking bread together, and being human.