poor, unfortunate images

This is an image of AI-generated people that I got from Adobe Stock. You will immediately notice its poor resolution—this is because I needed to find an AI-generated image of people to make the point I want to make in this essay, but I wanted to do it without AI-generating an image of people, because ew. I also don’t pay for an Adobe Stock subscription. I screenshotted and cropped the image from the free search results. So I must ask your forgiveness for this not being the best example. For all intents and purposes of this essay, it gets the point across.

Earlier this week, I was doing some work-related Tumblr scrolling and came across an AI-generated lesbian influencer. I’m unable to find this influencer now, but the image that I saw showed the influencer and the influencer’s girlfriend having dinner together.* As with several AI-generated images that I have seen, the first thing that tipped me off to its being AI-generated was this odd, unrealistic perspective that a lot of AI-generated images of people seem to take. It’s the same in the image above. It’s not always immediately apparent, but the longer you look at the image, the more it seems as if this is not the perspective of any person or being, but rather some untethered presence whose observation of this moment predicates its existence. I keep a passive eye out for this odd perspective whenever I’m online, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized I had seen a version of it before, in human-generated images from the 16th century.

Now, we all know that image-generating AI is trained off images generated by humans. This makes it possible, if not probable, that AI-generated images get this uncanny perspective from painted nudes of the Renaissance, among many other things. But whether this causal relationship exists or not isn’t particularly relevant to the point I am interested in—as with most things, I’d rather speculate on the ideological mechanisms at play.

For those of you who are familiar with the thesis work I did last year (and all of you are, to some degree or another, because the entire readership of this newsletter is my friends, my boyfriend, and my mom), you may recognize this line of analysis. First, and crucially, we must once again parse the difference between nakedness and nudity. As John Berger once wrote:

“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude” (Berger, 54).

Following this argument, nudity depicted in art, in images, is inherently objectifying. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. Nudity is nakedness put on display. And in order for that display to be adequately communicated, artworks and images depicting nudity take a certain perspective—an uncanny, inhuman perspective, intended for a viewer but not occupying a realistic position of viewership. If nudes were painted from the realistic perspective of a human viewer, the objectification of the nude would arguably be lost, as the presence of another person becomes the point through which we view the subject. The absence of this realism subtly reinforces the fact that the nude is painted for the consumption of the viewer outside the painting. Thus the nude and the viewer enter a relationship in which the viewer, occupying the real 3D world, wields power over the naked figure frozen in place. It is agency vs passivity. It is the subject vs the object.

In AI-generated images, this uncanny human perspective is used in other cases than the nude. But if we take this perspective as an inherent part of what makes the nude so objectifying, this vacuuming of humanity from the context of the image such that the figure within it may be viewed as an object fixed in time and space, I wonder if such perspective within AI-generated images constitutes a fetishization of the human.

My first impulse here was to compare AI-generated images to paintings, but there’s no parallel that makes sense. If we compare them through analysis of the artist/the medium/the artwork, their similarities get murky. Artificial intelligence cannot be the artist, as it is trained off human material and operates from human commands. Artificial intelligence cannot be the medium, because it itself manipulates the image such that it will take shape according to a given (human) command. Artificial intelligence occupies this nebulous space in between the two, in which it is not autonomous like the artist, but not as pliable or passive as the medium.

The crucial difference between a painting and an AI-generated image is that, aside from a few exceptional cases (looking at you, Goya), a painting is created in the company of others, whereas an AI-generated image is a solitary endeavour. Even if the painter of a nude paints it alone, they are informed by their patrons what they want, and they paint it with the intention of its being displayed for and viewed in the company of others. The viewing experience of a painting is open, social, even if done in solitude. Creating and consuming an AI-generated image is an inherently lonely endeavour. It is generated in a feigned relationship in which the human commander is simultaneously artist, patron, and viewer, and even if the image is disseminated, the technologies on which it is viewed are deeply isolating. A phone does not invite sociality in the same way that a room does. An AI-generated image removes you from the world rather than affirming your presence within it. It is precisely this reason that AI-generated images fetishize the human; an AI-generated image is born alone. It has no family, no friends, no caretakers. As it comes into existence it is thrust into the vast network of poor, orphaned images whose existences are entirely inconsequential.

This, of course, corroborates what most of us already knew; artificial intelligence reiterates the visual systems of oppression with which we have contended for hundreds of years. But it does so in some sort of disconnected, bastardized way. It lives off the regurgitated cud of the visual canon, echoing its biases while in desperate search of a soul.

*In writing this, I began wondering what pronouns would be proper to use to refer to an AI-generated person. This is a larger question than I can address in a pithy parenthetical note. Another essay to come.