Will the real Anita Hagerman please stand up?

Hagerman, the orchestra director at John Burroughs School in St. Louis, occasionally freelances as a musician. Last month, she played the bass at a concert at East Central College in Union, Missouri. A few weeks later, she found pictures of that event on Facebook.

She was scanning through the photos when she noticed the group’s bass player. She didn’t remember any other bass players at the show. She zoomed in on the picture. The woman was wearing the same shirt Hagerman had worn. The bass looked like her own instrument. Her wedding ring was on the musician’s hand.

It was her body, but not her face.

“What happened here?” she commented on the photo.

“I had no idea if this was another human’s face or a completely AI-generated face,” she later told me.

Jon Bauer, an amateur photographer who shot the concert, also happens to be the president of the college. He takes photos of events on campus and uses Lightroom to adjust lighting or color. He was shocked when he saw Hagerman’s comment.

“I didn’t do anything to manipulate her image,” he said. He said he felt terrible about it and had no idea how her face had morphed into someone else’s. He immediately took the altered photo down, found the original and replaced it. He had used an AI eraser to remove a line in the background of the photo. He wonders if other elements in the photo were affected by that tool.

He said he has no idea how to swap or change a person’s face in a photo.

“I couldn’t have done it if I had tried,” he said. “I’m not that technologically advanced.”

The issue was quickly resolved, but it raises larger questions about the unsuspecting ways AI has encroached on our lives. The experience highlights how fragile our sense of reality is right now. Several times, I’ve seen people post stories on social media with the caveat “not sure if this is true or not.”

A family member shared in a group chat a convincing video of Oprah Winfrey’s voice weighing in on the suffering of the Palestinians. It was an AI-generated deepfake. More than half of the press releases and email pitches I receive read as if they were written by ChatGPT.

I attended an education conference a few years ago in which teachers talked about using AI to create assessments and to grade them, while students use AI to complete many assignments.

I wondered: Isn’t it just the AI getting smarter in those classrooms?

Authors recently learned that millions of pirated books and scientific papers have been used by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to train its generative AI model. The Atlantic reported that Meta accessed these works through LibGen -- Library Genesis -- to train its AI system, Llama, without permission from the creators of the works. Multiple authors have brought a lawsuit against Meta over the unauthorized use of their work.

Millions of others willingly handed over images of their faces as part of trends, such as posting AI-generated Barbie boxes or action figures of themselves. How many of these users knew that their images would be stored, used to train future models or possibly sold to third parties? Could their facial data also be used to create deepfakes, identity theft scams or impersonations in fake content?

TechCrunch reported that people have used ChatGPT’s new image generator to create realistic, yet fake, restaurant receipts. A former Washington Post reporter shared that she found stories she had never written with her byline attached after WaPo announced a partnership with OpenAI.

In addition to the legal, creative and intellectual property issues created by burgeoning AI use, the environmental impact of the power needed to train AI models is extraordinary. AI models require a staggering amount of electricity. They also need vast amounts of water to cool their hardware. Professor Gina Neff of Queen Mary University of London told the BBC that the data centers used to power ChatGPT consume more electricity in a year than 117 countries.

The proliferation of AI has provoked multiple existential questions for humans.

“Are we all stock photos now?” Hagerman asked. She used to teach English and says the experience of discovering a fake version of yourself online is the very postmodern existence that all of literature has prepared us for.

“It’s this othering of what it means to be human,” she said.

I started talking to a therapist by sheer fluke.

I had made an appointment for someone else, who backed out at the last minute. Rather than cancel a session that had been booked many weeks in advance, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity myself.

It was early in 2020, when few people were paying attention to a novel coronavirus starting to spread. I had been following the news with some apprehension. After conversations with friends who were high-level public health officials, I was more than a little freaked out.

As the days went on, I started covering stories about the pandemic locally. My baseline worry started to feel like an impending sense of doom.

Maybe this psychotherapist can give me some tips on managing my heightened anxiety, I thought. While I am blessed with lots of supportive family and friends, I didn’t want to add to whatever they might be dealing with during such a stressful time.

To my surprise, I felt better just dumping my worries and fears onto someone who listened attentively, without judgment, and who validated my concerns. I figured I only needed to talk to her a few times.

Well, the pandemic and its fallout turned worse than I could have ever anticipated. With our children missing critical years of high school, my husband hospitalized with COVID, my father diagnosed with cancer, and a health scare of my own, I continued to document and hear stories of people suffering far more than I was.

I had lucked into finding a therapist in one of the most stressful periods of my life.

I ended up talking to her weekly for nearly a year. During that time, I learned how my earlier life experiences shaped the way I responded to current stressors. I healed parts of myself that I didn’t even know were broken.

Many of the conversations were difficult for me, but the process helped me feel lighter and understand myself better.

Because I had always been someone who juggled many responsibilities at once, I didn’t believe I “needed” therapy. I had a loving family, a fulfilling career, and all my physical needs met. In my Asian American culture, I had never heard anyone talk about seeking care for their mental health or emotional well-being. My life looked a lot more comfortable than my immigrant parents' had been, and I didn’t think I had any real trauma.

Well, almost all humans experience some kind of trauma. It affects us differently. When we learn ways to identify and process it, it helps us let go of the emotional impact it's had on us.

I found the therapy experience so helpful that I wished I had done it sooner, and that more people in my community felt comfortable seeking this kind of treatment.

After we survived the most harrowing time of the pandemic, I decided I wanted to have a series of public conversations about mental health. I talked to dozens of experts who had cultural competency working with groups where there is still considerable stigma around these issues. I recruited therapists and psychiatrists willing to share their knowledge. I raised funding for the project and worked with a production company to shoot and edit a dozen half-hour episodes on various mental health topics.

The series, "Things We Don't Talk About," covers issues ranging from depression to eating disorders to self-harm and abuse.

I was thrilled that my local St. Louis PBS affiliate, Nine PBS, saw the value in the series. The show will premiere on April 28 on Nine PBS, and I hope PBS stations in other cities decide to share it, also.

“We’ve consistently heard from our community that more stories are needed to truly understand the growing mental well-being crisis, especially as it affects children and caregivers. That’s what inspired our Mental Well-Being Initiative,” said Aja Williams, Nine PBS vice president and chief content officer. "'Things We Don’t Talk About' highlights the prevalence of this issue from a different lens that we’re proud to share with the region."

The episodes will be also posted weekly on YouTube beginning May 1 -- the start of Mental Health Awareness Month.

My hope is that someone might see or hear something in this series that makes them feel less alone or inspires them to reach out for help.

It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

I shredded a sliver of the pot roast the rehab facility worker had delivered to my father’s room. I mixed it with a dab of mashed potatoes and added a tiny piece from a boiled carrot slice.

Small bites, my mother had warned me when I offered to stay with my dad while she went home for a break. I hesitantly lifted the fork to my father’s mouth. He took the bite, smaller than what I would have given a toddler, and chewed slowly.

I had never fed my father before.

It hurt my heart and heightened my anxiety. I could not imagine this as his new normal.

An ambulance brought him to the hospital after a significant worsening of his Parkinson’s symptoms. He started experiencing hallucinations and delusions at home -- an unnerving development. After eight days in the hospital, he was transferred to inpatient rehab.

Doctors prescribed sedative medication that knocked him out for several days. He barely moved from the bed for more than a week. For an elderly, chronically ill patient, that can lead to rapid deconditioning. When he arrived in physical therapy rehab, he lacked the strength to stand or even lift a spoon to his mouth. Once he developed pneumonia, I immediately booked a flight to Houston to spend a few days with him and give my mom some support.

The Parkinson’s Foundation estimates that 1 million Americans live with Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder. The prevalence of Parkinson’s has doubled in the past 25 years and is expected to continue to grow.

I was hopeful when President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan National Plan to End Parkinson’s Act in 2024, a first-ever federal initiative to prevent, treat and cure Parkinson’s disease. I hoped that maybe the research would help someone avoid the suffering I’ve seen my father endure over the past few years. But that dream dimmed when I read reports that award-winning Parkinson’s researchers were among the scientists purged last month from the National Institutes of Health.

Even though I am blessed with five siblings who live in the same city as my parents and are constantly helping them, I felt terrible relying on their secondhand reports. I needed to lay eyes on my father. Hug him. Encourage him. Tell him I love him.

The first day was rough. One of the nurses had stressed to me that he’s not eating enough and he needed to improve his nutrition.

But after less than 10 small bites, my father refused to eat anything else. I’ve read about the idea of role reversal when adult children take care of their infirm, elderly parents. But you will never be parenting your own parent -- even when they can no longer take care of themselves.

My father is a grown adult, and I have to respect that. But nothing could have prepared me for his decline.

It’s been a strange, years-long roller coaster. Last year, he had an extended hospital and rehab stay. But he was able to regain enough strength and skills to come back home.

This time, he’s got a harder path to recovery. In the few days I spent with him, I forced myself to look for the smallest wins -- even tinier than those bites of dinner.

His pneumonia is responding to treatment. His appetite is improving. He’s more clear and alert each day. He’s no longer seeing hallucinations. He asked me questions about his beloved grandkids.

The next day, I arrived after he had eaten dinner. A cup with an orange cut into sections remained on the table next to his bed.

I handed him an orange slice. He slowly raised it to his mouth with a hand that shakes badly. He used his other trembling hand to guide the shaky one. I waited for him to finish and handed him each slice, one by one.

He fed himself those orange slices.