Maintaining “Extegrity” in a Digitally Altered World
Professional image makers—such as painters, photographers, and filmmakers—deal with questions about the authenticity and integrity of images all the time.
AI and advances in image and video editing software are making it easier for all kinds of men to digitally alter or enhance images of themselves.
There are many examples, but one that jumps out at me is the “corporate portrait.”
Getting a professional portrait taken is expensive and time-consuming. Now there are AI apps that can take a poorly groomed person who works at home in their sweatpants, put them in a suit they don’t own, and make them appear “professional” for job search profiles and marketing.
That’s a bait and switch--it’s deceptive.
Right now, if you look closely, you can still often tell which portraits are AI and which aren’t. However, it is likely that AI will have advanced in 6-12 months to the point where that is no longer the case. So the artificially generated image will “pass.”
If you use that image to advertise yourself on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, or Instagram, you are committing a kind of fraud—especially if you don’t even have a suit or have only worn a suit at weddings and funerals.
It’s not just that you don’t have the suit. It’s that you’re not that guy. You’re not the guy who wears and feels comfortable in a suit. Could you walk into a room full of men who wear suits every day and pass as one of them socially? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe that’s a skill issue. But if you couldn’t, and you would look and feel awkward, you would be misrepresenting yourself by using an AI photo like that.
The choices you make about when, how, and to what extent you alter representations of yourself and present them to the world have the potential to damage your integrity—or perhaps we should say “extegrity.”
Extegrity
Integrity is a word we use to describe a harmony between what one says and does. The Latin root is integer, the same word we use for “whole numbers” that aren’t fractions. Integrity essentially means the same thing as wholeness or wholesomeness. Something or someone that is wholesome or has integrity is complete, unbroken, undivided, unconflicted, pure, and consistent.
My friend Tanner Guzy recently coined the term “extegrity.” The same linguistic connections aren’t there, but it sounds like what he means by it, which is basically “external integrity.” Tanner is a coach who helps men align their clothing and grooming with their personality, social environment, and values.
However, we can take this beyond clothing and grooming and use the word to categorize any integrity issues that have to do specifically with external presentation and appearance.
There are also potential integrity issues with how you present yourself with words. Ghostwriters, anonymous accounts, copywriters, and LLMs all present opportunities for misrepresentation. However, I think it makes the most sense to limit “extegrity” to your external “shell” and treat integrity issues involving public words separately. I hope Tanner agrees. I think he will.
A man with extegrity presents images of himself that are consistent with who he actually is. There should be no disconnect or dissonance when you meet him in person.
Cleaning up an image—like removing the occasional blemish—is basically just grooming. I spent at least an hour using Adobe Premiere to track and mask out a booger in this reel. I wasn’t misrepresenting myself. I don’t always have a booger in my nose, I just happened to have one dangling around all the way through my best take.
The idea of multiple “takes” also presents an extegrity question, but I think it aligns with presenting the best version of yourself. Some say they want people to be “real” and show themselves stumbling, stuttering, and displaying all their blemishes and boogers. I’ll address “realness” in a later piece.
The actual extegrity conflict happens when you’re editing something in such a way that you’re presenting something fake to deceive people and misrepresent yourself—scraping off 20 pounds you never lost, adding abs you never had, or muscles you never built. I’ve known lifters who used video editing tricks to fake gym PRs for attention.
Several years ago, I hired a professional bodybuilding photographer to photograph me following a cut. I was in good shape and worked hard on the cut, but I was not “stage” lean by any stretch of the imagination. Everyone uses posing and lighting to present the best look for physique photos—there’s always a little bit of magic being done. But when the photographer sent me his final edits, he had “enhanced” some of the photos to an extent that I wasn’t comfortable sharing them. They misrepresented my achievement, and the edits were obvious enough that my body looked “fake” and veered into the uncanny valley.
I’m only posting this photo now, in this context:
That photo was taken in 2019, well before AI, but if I told you that it was an AI-generated image, you might believe it at first glance.
We could have endless discussions about what kinds of photographs a man should take or have taken. There are whole groups of men who believe that men shouldn’t care what they look like. On Superbowl Sunday, most of those guys will be watching their professionally manicured heroes discuss the game while wearing makeup and $5,000 custom suits. That’s a subject for another day.
Men make all kinds of judgments about the way other men present themselves. Their “rules” are usually cultural, often related to social class, and sometimes projections of their own insecurities. For instance, the men who complain about other men taking their shirts off are almost always men who are embarrassed to take their shirts off.
That said, in America, if you’re in a band, you can get away with anything. It is an unwritten rule of mandom that you can wear any damn thing or be photographed doing any damn thing, as long as there is music involved. Just make sure you’re really playing the music in the closeup shots—beyond that, anything is a game. Steven Tyler from Aerosmith has been dressing like a biker’s hippie girlfriend for 50 years and no one cares. It’s all about the music, man.
There are different rules for art. If it’s obvious that you’re playing a character and that’s part of what you do, there is no extegrity conflict. Russell Crowe was never really a Roman soldier and Brad Pitt was definitely not Achilles. We “suspend our disbelief” to immerse ourselves in a story and experience the waking dream of theater.
When I was growing up, green screens were only accessible to Hollywood special effects teams, but now, that technology is available to everyone at a relatively low cost. I had a videographer film “Invocation of the Storm” on a green screen and I did all of the green screen keying myself.
The intent was to create something mythic and dreamlike. It was presented as a music video or a cinematic performance, and I don’t think anyone thought they were supposed to believe that I was calling up a storm or thunder and lightning.
It was a risk to try something like this—I was really putting myself out there. But it was something I wanted to do, and I’m proud of it.
At some point, more men are going to have to create their own film projects, or we deserve to have all of our art come from the limousine communists in Hollywood.
Men are always criticizing the people who make the art we consume, but few are willing to try to make it. It’s a bit sad that many of the “schizo videos” that the young men on the right love are just montages of Hollywood footage produced by people who hate them. Make your own footage.
Art is an exception, but returning to extegrity, let’s say I post a photo or video of myself in Paris, using a green screen or AI technology. I’ve only ever been to the airport in Paris during a transfer. A photo of me in Paris, presented without context on social media, is a lie.
This technology will likely be used by con artists. I’m sure it’s happening already. Like the man wearing a suit he doesn’t own, a social climber working a scam could post photos of himself in all of the European hotspots for the rich and famous to make his Ponzi scheme or whatever seem legitimate.
Over the years, I’ve come up with a few rules of thumb about maintaining my own extegrity while also creating artful images as a public figure.
Here are some guidelines I use when presenting myself as myself and not a character, which is usually the case because I’m not a professional actor.
Never hold a weapon I have no experience using.
Never wear the gear of a martial art I haven’t practiced.
Never pretend to have achieved something I haven’t achieved -- no mountain tops I haven’t climbed, no places I haven’t traveled to, no weights I haven’t lifted, no physique I haven’t built and starved for.
Never pretend to be doing something I don’t know how to do or don’t actually enjoy. You’ll never see me working on a car or pretending I ride motorcycles, hunting, playing survivalist, or skiing. (Unless, for some reason, I actually do one of those things.)
Never fake status -- so many guys will rent cars they can’t afford, photograph themselves in suits they don’t wear, or even get photographed in private jets they can’t afford to charter. I’ve heard some even rent models to pretend to be their girlfriends. (All of this can also be done with Photoshop, video editors, or AI.)
You can use photographers, videographers, or editing software to present the best version of yourself, but the goal is to be recognized and remembered for who you actually are.
Don’t use professionals or technology to present a fake version of a man you wish you were. Become that guy, or don’t.
I see people experimenting with editing images all the time now that the technology is so accessible. More AI apps are being released every day, and new options and opportunities to alter images of yourself will keep presenting themselves. Some men rarely, if ever, post any images of themselves online, some have personal or professional profiles, and some men are public figures who are photographed all the time.
This advice is targeted specifically at younger men who are coming of age at a time when many men are using technology to misrepresent themselves, and the technology to do so is always at their fingertips.
Creating new “rules” for how we present ourselves isn’t as helpful as developing a sense of awareness about the idea of maintaining extegrity in a digitally altered world. Every new technology will present new opportunities to deceive and misrepresent ourselves, and it is up to us to decide how we want to use it and what kind of men we want to be.
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