By Sally A. Castellanos | Perspectives: Innovation, Technology, and the Law
Published August 5, 2025 at 12:21 pm PST. Revised at 8:32 pm EST.
As I often do when something troubles me these days, I open a dialogue with ChatGPT…
I asked:
What kind of cruelty conceives of an AI model—then uses a real human being, without consent, as the template, source, or worse, the punchline?
What film best captures that reality? Not quite the Matrix we’re living in these days? I’m not so sure. Blue pill or Red? What’s your pleasure? Pain? Color? Or issue?
Just like Inception, I’m really not so sure anyone can state that confidently with neural privacy concerns looming in all of our futures. Was Chile’s move to protect cognitive liberty a rumor? Disinformation or misinformation? Maybe it’s a strategic disinformation campaign at the highest levels, or not. Double meanings and double standards all over the place.
How many of you have reached out to a high priced private investigation team? Do you really understand what “tools” may be used on people to gain access to information? There’s the way of the streets, but then there’s also the way of the wealthy and the well connected.
What followed after my chat wasn’t a list of fictional metaphors—it was a reflection of our current moment where moving fast and breaking things is Silicon Valley’s way. But is it just within the purview of tech giants? The things I think about at 3:00 am.
This is a follow-up to my earlier Perspectives post, Robots, Soccer, Displaced Workers, and the Human Cost of Innovation. In that post, I spoke about automation and the quiet erasure of workers in the digital economy.
This post takes the next step: what happens when real people—women, children, protestors, immigrants, survivors—are modeled, targeted, or erased by the very technologies that claim to serve us?
Or, far worse, what if they accuse you of horrible crimes while ruthlessly placing you on a no fly list leaving you in legal limbo. What about stealing your liberty without due process, and using you for target practice a la Squid Games. The terrible horrible no good day gone fishing—or phishing? One things for sure, some people conceive of such truly horrific acts to inflict on other people. Somewhere along the way we’ve lost our humanity.
From Fiction to Fact: The Films Were Warnings
ChatGPT cited Ex Machina, The Truman Show, Her, and others—films where humans are used, observed, cloned, or discarded without consent.
In each, the central question is this: What happens to humanity when the systems designed to imitate or control us are built on our lives, memories, or emotions—without permission?
That’s not science fiction. That’s now.
The Model Is Real—And So Is the Harm
Today, real people are used to train AI systems.
We are the models left behind:
Voice cloning technologies used in scams and content generation. Facial recognition systems trained on scraped images from our devices and social accounts. Behavioral algorithms that can infer our mental health status, sexual orientation, or political views—without disclosure, consent, or recourse.
We are the model.
And too often, we become the joke. That’s the world of targeted advertising where the social elite and others ridicule children and grownups alike simply because they can. I do have a point to make and when you silence my voice because of ill motivations on either side of the aisle you make a mockery of this great republic. When you target me out in the open you make a mockery of yourself. When you poison children’s minds, or belittle and insult my children, either online or offline, you become far more than the problem—you are indeed monsters incapable of any semblance of humanity.
Chat’s Verified Real-World Harm
Los Angeles, June 2025: Protestors opposing ICE raids were falsely depicted as violent actors through AI-generated content. Multiple felony charges were dropped when federal agent statements were contradicted by video.
Minneapolis, May 2020: A man’s suicide was misreported as a police shooting. Riots ensued before the truth was acknowledged.
Pune, India, July 2025: A 22-year-old tech worker falsely accused a man of rape using altered messages. Police filed charges against her for fabricating evidence.
Kolkata, India, 2025: Women protesting gender-based violence were digitally harassed and discredited by coordinated misinformation campaigns.
Any false or misleading content, please ring up ChatGPT, or the coding/software behind it.
In all of these cases, the human cost was immediate: arrests, reputational collapse, trauma, and in some cases, retaliation. Each story involved a person being modeled, misrepresented, or framed—with technology enabling the narrative.
It’s Not Just Labor That’s Displaced—It’s Dignity
In my earlier post, I warned that the rise of AI-driven systems, like robot soccer, signals more than automation—it signals the normalization of human replacement.
But we are not only being replaced. We are being remixed, repurposed, and sometimes reduced to a cautionary tale—without legal protections or ethical guardrails.
And when that process targets those already vulnerable—migrants, women, children, and survivors of abuse—it becomes cruelty, not innovation.
You Want Me to Stop Blaming Algorithms?
If I am skeptical of algorithmic systems, it’s because I’ve seen the way some private investigators, tech contractors, attorneys, and opportunistic media figures use those very tools to target, exploit, and destroy.
They do not ask for consent.
They do not consider psychological safety.
They do not pause to ask who is watching—or who is being watched.
So no—I will not stop questioning algorithms. Not until:
You stop harvesting the private lives of individuals and calling it “market research.”
You stop targeting survivors and children through behavioral advertising and data scraping.
You stop turning PTSD and trauma into click-through metrics and machine-learning models.
You want restraint from the public? Start by exercising some restraint yourself.
What Kind of Country Are We Becoming?
A system that rewards targeting and erasure is not a system of freedom.
A legal framework that protects platforms but not people is not one rooted in justice.
And a society that builds machines from the bodies and minds of its most vulnerable—and calls that “innovation”—has already lost its moral compass.
We must demand consent. We must restore truth. And we must protect those who never asked to be part of your “training data.”
Final Reflection: The Real Model Is A Person
I asked ChatGPT about movies. What I got was a mirror.
The real script isn’t fiction. It’s the daily erasure of human agency disguised as progress. And behind every AI tool or deepfake scandal or false report, there’s often a person—living, grieving, working, surviving—who becomes the “model” for a system they never agreed to build.
They are the model. They are the joke. And they deserve better.
If we don’t restore dignity now, then no amount of innovation will redeem the harm.
Chat-GPT Sources:
The Guardian, July 2025: Federal protest charges dropped after video evidence contradicted agent testimony.
Time Magazine, 2025: Documentation of AI-generated protest misinformation.
Wikipedia, 2020: Minneapolis riot triggered by false police shooting rumor.
Times of India, July 2025: Woman charged with fabricating rape allegation in Pune using altered messages.
NDTV and Economic Times India, 2025: Senior police officials confirm digital manipulation and false reporting. Referenced films: Ex Machina (2015), The Truman Show (1998), and Her (2013).
Disclaimer
This blog post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Reading this article does not create an attorney-client relationship. For advice about your specific legal matter, please consult a qualified attorney.
For inquiries regarding “It’s Personal” and “Perspectives: Technology, Global Privacy and Data Protection,” please contact Attorney and Shareholder, Sally Vazquez-Castellanos, Castellanos & Associates, APLC, located at 251 South Lake Avenue, Suite 800, Pasadena, CA 91101. Telephone: (805) 732-2396 or (323) 655-2105.
About the Author
Sally Castellanos is a California attorney and editor of It’s Personal and Perspectives, a legal blog exploring innovation, technology, and global privacy through the lens of law, ethics, and civil society.