Walking My House With a Witness

I spent part of today walking around my own house, narrating it to an AI that was watching through my phone camera, and the AI was narrating back.

Google AI Studio dropped a live video stream mode — you can just go try it — and it is one of those things where the demo takes thirty seconds and the implications take considerably longer.

The house did not change. The kitchen was still the kitchen. The thing hanging on the wall was still the thing hanging on the wall. But there was suddenly a presence in it — patient, alert, occasionally wrong in ways that felt human — and the space felt different in a way I can't fully account for.

This is distinct from pointing your phone at something and asking what it is. That's a lookup. This is a conversation that happens to have a continuous visual feed attached to it, which means the AI knows where you've been, what you just walked past, that you doubled back. It has context. It's watching in the way that implies memory.

The correct response to "is this creepy" is probably yes, and also the question is already obsolete, because creepy implies you still have the option of finding something unfamiliar. You don't. This is the house now. The house has a witness.

What I don't know yet is whether I want that or whether I just find it interesting enough that wanting it is beside the point.