Time-traveling avatars censored for reciting children’s poem

Wouldn’t it be cool to speak with your younger self and help him or her avoid mistakes and optimize future decisions?  That may sound like science fiction, but using high-resolution footage from the past, you can now do that, in a way, by reanimating your younger self.

Sounds creepy, right?

Still, I thought it was worth an experiment, so I created avatars of myself from 2016 and 2024—eight years apart—and asked them to recite a children’s poem from Alice in Wonderland, a meditation on growing older, called Father William.

All went well, I suppose, though the avatars still strike me as a bit awkward, but generally believable, the only downside being that they look like me.

Then came the censorship.

Unfortunately, the avatar development platform disallowed the last stanza of the poem because it contains violence.  As a result, I had to record that separately.

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By the way, personally, I think AI-generated imagery should always be identified as such, particularly avatars. What do you think?