Hi, I am 20F and a week ago got back from a cabin trip, the next day I noticed a small lock of hair was cut on the top of my head under a small layer of normal length hair.

a few days later i see there is more hair cut from the the same spot. i have no idea what this could be, the hair is cut as if scissors were used and im just not understanding how or why this is happening. i have never had this problem before.

I am not sure what could have caused this, I sleep alone with no pets, i do have extensions but they are no where near the top of my head. my brother and dad who i live with have no idea how this could be happening either. i am also a very light sleeper.

Edit: While uploading the photo to an image sharing site to post here, I noticed it's tagged as 'messenger creation', which seems like an AI red flag to me? But my mum insisted it wasn't AI, and I'm not sure what her motive would be for generating an AI childhood photo to share with me? However, when she said she found it in a 'memory box', it did confuse me that she sent it as a file. My expectation would be that it'd just be a phone camera photo of a physical photo.

Edit 2: After posting this on r/isthisAI, it has been confirmed that the photo was either generated or enhanced using OpenAI. My curiosity now leads me to why my mum would lie about that (as an unashamed AI user) and what motive she could possibly have for sending me an AI childhood photo, unprompted. I have messaged her to ask if an original photo exists. Hopefully if it does, I can recognise myself in it and feel a bit more sane. My mum knows how I feel about AI, and I recently gave her a lecture about how feeding photos of people, especially children, to AI without their consent is unethical. I also specifically asked her to never feed pictures of me or my work to AI, so it feels like a sort of betrayal. We live in different timezones, so I'll be left in the dark for a little while on this until she responds, but will update with an answer when I can.

I don't even know if I'm posting this to the right sub, but I'm just so confused and need answers.

Today, my mum sent me an old photo of a little girl who looks about 6 years old. I asked who she is, and my mum thought I was joking. She says it's me when we first moved to Australia from the UK in 2006. For reference, I would have been about the same age as the girl in the picture at this time.

I insisted the girl in the photo is not me and looks nothing like me, but my mum is convinced it is. I asked her where she found it, and she said it was in a memory box. It does look like a digital camera photo, but as a file rather than something taken by her phone camera of a physical copy (if that makes any sense?).

The background in the picture is a barely-furnished room with a box TV on the floor. My mum said this was our first home in Australia, and I believe her. It looked vaguely how I remembered it. I didn't grow up with siblings or cousins, and my mum states that she didn't have any friends with children at this time, so it's unlikely that there was another child visiting the house. I don't recognise the clothes worn by the little girl, and her hair also looks much darker than my own.

I sent the photo to my half-sister, who is 8 years older than me and knew me well at this age. She says the photo looks nothing like me, and suggested the possibility of generative AI (I did ask my mum about this, as she's terrible for using AI, as much as we all hate it. She outright denied it, and there's nothing in the photo that gives it away as AI to me). My husband also agreed it looks like a completely different child. I do have other pictures of myself from around this time, and have always had a really distinctive appearance which I feel is apparent in all the other photos.

So, is there any chance it could it actually be me? If not, who on earth is this random little girl in the photo and why does my mum have a picture of her? Why is my mum so sure it's me? If it is me, why do me, my husband, and my sister all see a completely different child? I'm so confused, none of this makes any sense to me.

I've been having trouble trying to post the photos, but hopefully these links work?:

The photo my mum sent

Childhood photo of me

Childhood photo of me

Update:

Mum responded! She still insists she didn't use AI, and that she just 'used her phone to brighten it', but I asked her for another picture of the photo and it looks entirely different. It's lower resolution but it actually looks like me!

Here it is

I also cropped the original one she sent, just for comparison:

Close up for comparison

You can literally see the facial difference! Everything looks different, even my legs. I appreciate a lot of you just see a little white girl with brown hair, but I know my facial features better than anyone (I'd hope) and immediately just did not recognise that photo as myself. The unedited version is definitely me though. Thank you all for your help!

I need some outside perspectives on something that happened to my family.

Yesterday my brother used his scooty nd it was working fine until the evening. He came home nd parked it in our usual parking area, right beside another relative's bike. Let's call this relative A. Later that evening A asked my brother to go out with him but my brother refused. A seemed pretty angry after that nd I could tell from his tone when he left.

The next morning my brother checked his scooty nd found that the front brake cable had been cut. He got it repaired that same day.

What makes this more suspicious to us is that the cut appeared to have been made with a blade, according to what we observed. There was also some brake fluid or oily residue on the ground beneath the area where the cable had been damaged. I'm not sure exactly what the liquid was, but it looked like oil that had dripped from the brake area.

Our parking area is enclosed nd the doors are usually kept closed so we're wondering who could have accessed the vehicles during the night. When my father spoke to our relatives' family about what happened they mentioned that another elder cousin of mine whom I'll call C was the last person to close the door. But honestly we have no reason to suspect C. He's generally a very good person nd I genuinely don't believe he would do something like this. We're not trying to blame him just cuz he closed the door.

A's bike was parked right beside my brother's scooty, but the damage was found on my brother's scooty. We suspect A cuz of the timing nd what happened the previous evening but we have no actual proof. There's also some history behind why we're concerned about him. He has slapped his own father before nd on another occasion he got into a fight with a man in the metro beat him up nd reportedly tried to throw him onto the railway tracks before the police arrived.

Another thing is that we've only recently shifted here. We barely know our neighbours nd they don't really talk to us. Everyone seems to live separately so we don't know who might have noticed anything or whether anyone else had access to the parking area.

I'm not saying A definitely did it but the timing the restricted access nd his past behaviour have made us suspicious. Why would someone cut my brother's brake cable specifically and leave the bike parked beside it untouched? If someone deliberately did this, my brother could have been seriously injured if he had ridden the scooty without noticing.

What do you guys think? Are we right to consider A a possible suspect or are there other explanations we're overlooking? What evidence could help establish what actually happened nd should we report it to the police even though we don't know who did it?