How Lucy Sante Became the Person She Feared

In early 2021, the writer Lucy Sante sent an e-mail to her closest friends. Its subject was "A Bombshell," which Sante later joked was an unintentional pun. In the text she attached, she explained that at the age of sixty-six she was accepting her long-suppressed identity as a transgender woman. Her transition had been catalyzed by an interaction with artificial intelligence. That February, Sante had downloaded FaceApp, a photo-editing application that uses neural networks to generate realistic transformations of people's faces.