None of these people exist.
I made them from words.
I have been lured into the world of #AIArt by @adesinai.artistry
And we have talked a lot about how the Ai Art algorithm just turns out a lot of straight size white people.
And how important it is to get in there early to try and disrupt this.
#Midjourney, like all the other machine learning AI tools learns from what it is fed.
And it is fed a lot of people wanting to make a lot of people who replicate what they are socialised to see as beautiful, which is very monolithic.
So it replicates this, and builds more of it and then gives it to more people.
And I have noticed, that no matter what prompt I begin with, as things progress and the image refines, with each iteration, it gets more white, more Eurocentric features, younger, thinner, more flawless skin, her clothes begin falling off, her chest gets bigger...
And possibly most concerning to me is they all begin to have this kind of come-hither-sexy-but-I'm-frightened look in their eyes.
It's terrifying.
And it does not have to be this way.
No matter what the starting point was, I have to keep cranking the steering wheel back on course.
Some of us are on a mission to try and mess with the model early, so we are not building a future which replicates all of the problems we have with caucasian beauty ideals being seen as the baseline.
So I have been putting a lot of time into creating images which span the breadth of humanity I love and cherish and value and want more of us to see more of us.
They are not perfect (and are not meant to be).
But they are also too perfect - the skin is too perfect, the eyes are sometimes too sharp (and the hands sometimes look like they were drawn with crayons) - but I am going to keep working on creating more disruptive images, not only because of the politics of it all but because it is SO. MUCH. FUN.
Would you like to see more of them every so often?
And which is your favourite? (And what shall we name them?).