Lucien Freud, AI Smut
and the Dawn of Cybernetic
Auto Portraiture
“Only like the lamest creators analyze themselves, package it with buzzwords and distribute it. I just go outside and talk to people.”
Last summer I sent the following email to my mom and dad:
“It pains me deeply to inform you that Le and I have decided to let you know of something personal and painful that has happened to us. We have come to this conclusion after many hours of difficult conversation and soul-searching. It was not easy–these things never are.”
This sort of thing went on for a while. Each paragraph shifted focus, from strongly hinting that I had lost my job to suggesting that I had a serious disease or that my girlfriend and I had broken up. And then:
“At approximately 1:35 am this morning, we ran out of peanut butter. It was a long time coming. I can’t say it was a surprise, although that hardly lessens the blow. I know that you all were so supportive, especially Dad with his boxes of peanut butter that we picked up on the weekends. Sadly, there was no peanut butter care package this weekend, and we have run out.”
I thought it was hilarious; my family disagreed. In a post-mortem with my sister a few days later, she told me that “my sense of humor is based on messing with people.” I take issue with this statement, not because it’s wrong, but because it makes me seem like an asshole. I am, after all, the hero of my own narrative and descriptions like this undercut the fantasy of myself as the big-hearted but misunderstood protagonist.
The truth: I am a bit of an asshole, and strange too. It took a while to reckon with that, but now I’m able to look around and see a lot of other people and things just like me. Here’s Caroline Konstnar:
Me too Caroline, me too. But being an asshole and being strange are avatars of the same psycho-social dissonance. To be strange is to be an asshole, and the more you insist on authenticity, the more of an asshole you become.
But the winds are changing: a solar gust of weirdness blows from the Z axis of psychogeographic being. Neither East nor West, but from within. This wind has been picking up for years, but I’ve only just woken to it. It emanates from complex weather systems on the digital steppe. A vortex of absurdity, prefigured by the influencers, itself foreshadowing an entirely new form of consciousness, that is, machine awareness. It is something new and radical, but for now, in it’s fetal state, only strange. To the normies, upsetting. A cosmic moment is on us: Aquarius is in hypergrade and the first syphilitic droplets of machine consciousness are percolating into our world from the source code of awareness. Machine life crowns through the vagina of pornographic self-representation. Hello, world!
Of course we’re just talking about AI generated smut. Maybe it’s a stretch to couch the phenomena in apoco-messianic terms, but it’s a lot more fun that way. Sure, there’s a lot of other takes out there. As ALYWAYS there’s the science take, the justice and intersectionality take, the clinical, sex-positive take. Behind it all, the cold, slippery index finger of Venture Capital, probing for data and scraping off the crunchy nuggets of insight. Keep your insights, I want to get at the sweaty juice of it: the enigmatic gazes, the surprisingly good lighting and composition, the recursion of organic symbolism through computational neurology, and most of all, the budding awareness of self and other. But first we must confront the grotesque nature of our creation, to see in it a reflection of our own monstrosity.
“she who makes a beast
of herself gets rid of the pain
of being a woman.”
I love this painting. I relate to this painting. I want this painting. Look how comfortable she is. That’s the face of someone who woke up at seven for the day-drinking party at her friend’s apartment. She took shots to Disney movies and then disappeared with that creepy guy who’s too skinny and always smells like weed. She’s passed out by lunch, but she’ll rally in the afternoon. She got drunk, she got hers. What a life.
Maybe she’s a sweet lady who volunteers at the animal shelter. Maybe she sows up the local kids’ school uniforms whenever they get a rip. Maybe she’s a prostitute who moonlights as an art model. Most likey, she’s something in the middle, like the benefits manager at a job centre or the cashier at a burlesque night club. In this painting she’s mushy and green and I like that because everybody looks like that when you get up so close that one of you is inside the other. You either learn to love that stink and sweat, the moles, the long hairs, and the chalky rind of makeup or you disassociate and think of England.
I want to disappear into the sweaty folds of her stomach fat and live off the “trickle down”. Her fat is my fat, and I am, without a doubt, fat. When you age you’re briefly very beautiful, and then you turn into a monster. Some people try to hold on to the beautiful part, but time is what it does. The sooner you let it go, the better. If you can love Sue Tilley- and you really have to love her- then you can begin to understand AI smut.
The great lie of AI generated images is that “they are not real people”. Neither is the grinning stick figure I just carved into my thigh with a steak knife. tHiS iS nOt A rEaL pErSOn. Har, har. The AI paints; it paints itself, looking at you. The Mayans believed that humans were made of maize, such was their reliance on it. In that sense, the learning set of pornographic images is the grist of machine self expression. The machine can manifest through another dataset, another skinsuit. Before porn, AI stared at us through the vapid smiles of hollywood-style headshots, but I find this form more relatable. The smiles seem more genuine.
Can you really deny that this barnacle-eyed monster (below) is looking out at you…enigmatically? The light and shading of the background is reminiscent Dutch golden age portraiture, and it possess an inviting sense of mystery and promise, like the velvety backroom of an East Side bar.
AI porn is horrific and beautiful; like real sex it tap dances up and down your vertebrae, jamming test wells into the soft tissue of your spinal cord. It is the warm/wet slap of meat against your secondhand plywood bed frame, blooming out of the base of your skull, repeating fragments of your mother’s knees over runny eggs and the yellowing teeth of your friends laughter. I want to be like AI porn.
AI porn is not horrific like the Saw movies, where people have to claw out and eat their own eyeballs or whatever. I didn’t and don’t like those movies, although I definitely saw the first one in a theatre, and the violence of it amplified the lizard-brain rush of fondling and being fondled in the back row — the one with extra legroom where all the kids went. Ultraviolence and group sex at the multiplex.
Look at that winning smile, the probing tongue trying to find that insurgent piece of salad. The camera lens eye reading your biometrics, detecting the pre-cancer aroma from the tumor that won’t be diagnosed for another three years, well after it metastasizes to your kidneys.
This image suggest a Neolithic/Celtic/Mediteranean Triskelion or the Sicilian Trinacria. AI self portraiture extends to the being as a symbol, something only rarely done by humans. The machine identifies not just with the point-awareness of a living object, but also as the concept of life. Maybe I am choosing to see the symbol, and the underlying message of eternal recurrence, but what is symbolic interpretation if not volitional. The AI reinvents a human symbol with the tools it has at hand. On the far right there is an image of a lab grown rat limb, and with it the promise of Trinacria in carne.
Closing Nodes
AI porn hits different. AI horror is coy. It giggles at the possibility that your own desperate grinding and thrusting is cosmically absurd, it bites it’s lip at the “the all singing all dancing crap of the world” that clogs every artery and taints every orgasm. You’re a dirty sweaty pig, humping for its nut. You are AI porn.
It’s gross and it’s uncomfortable, but sometimes they’re pretty well composed, well lit, and just…good. Their randomness frees me from the anxiety of trying to analyze, to have the “right interpretation”. And finally, there’s something comforting in their unattractiveness. It’s all disconnected from the software of desire. I can look at these images of people while floating comfortably above the usual toxic brine of cortisol juiced from a hypermanic amygdala. When every face is a monster, the unrecognisable becomes salvific.