The imperfections serve as a kind of verfremdungseffekt, making the viewer aware that he's looking at a photograph, rather than at a person. As such René Magritte comes to mind. It is fascinating that he made his own camera, though. That certainly adds to the quality of the images, though it's of course a kind of non-diegetic contents. He said, with a wry smile.
verfremdungseffekt = distancing effect, something devised to cause you to not identify on an emotional level with the subjects or the action in the scene, but to see the image from a more dispassionate intellectual perspective. Magritte was mentioned because his work often "breaks the fourth wall," directly addressing the viewer instead of the more traditional painterly approach of creating drama in the scene.
non-diegetic content = content which is not part of the world of the scene itself. The scratches on the photos aren't part of the world that the subjects live in.
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I already passed the Voight-Kampff test. Didn't even need to fire my gun! :) As for GPT-3, well, it needs real input—like the above—to generate its contents. Here's a crude fore-runner taking postmodern discourse to the extreme: https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Cheers. I genuinely can't tell the difference between the artificially generated postmodern discourse that is supposed to be just gibberish and real postmodern discourse that is not. Perhaps this is just a case of extreme jargon overload that makes it unintelligible for anyone who is not part of the group?
Or is this some commentary on the futility of the discourse, and postmodern discourse is just a performance art?
