reachartwork

robsheridan

One year ago, my "Meat Gala" AI body horror fashion series, imagining demons from Hell attending the MET Gala, went wildly viral on social media (here's a Buzzfeed article/interview with me about it)

My subversion of the event's elite glamour with nightmarish gore that commented on the grotesque opulence of the 1% really resonated with people, and as the first AI horror art to go viral in this way it was the first exposure many people had to the dark side of what was possible with AI imaging. It also led a lot of very angry Christians who inexplicably thought it was real (enjoy the comments here and here), and it also led to terms like "body horror," "flesh," and even "Cronenberg" getting banned from MidJourney (I didn't even use the term "Cronenberg" in my prompts), sealing the work in a liminal space in AI art history, unable to be recreated or continued. Of course it didn't slow down my AI horror journey, and the spirit of this work - both visually and in out-of-control viral impact - continued this year with my Valentine of the Flesh body horror fashion series.

This series is also special for me because of the subsequent conversations I had with MidJourney's DavidH in which I argued against their censorship of horror art, and he revealed a depressingly vanilla view of "art" and "beauty" that he sought to curate with his platform. What I had discovered, first with VIIR and then with The Meat Gala, was that the algorithmic opinion towards artistic beauty which made MidJourney at the time leagues ahead of previous AI art tech, could be subverted to make stunning and wholly unique horror art. The elegant way those early versions of the software blended elements together like surrealist paintings was meant to ensure that any prompt result gave you something that looked like beautiful art, but what I found is that if you pointed it in the right direction, it would do the same thing with blood and flesh and bones and tentacles, to spectacular uncanny horror effect. In the case of The Meat Gala, the effect was even more potent, as elements of demonic body horror gore were twisted through lenses of beauty, glamour, and opulence. To me, I was making beautiful surreal nightmares, and I was floored with the potential I saw and the ideas it gave me. But David and the other MidJourney creators saw nothing but a perversion of their software. They were, in fact, shocked by my Meat Galaseries and worried that its viral spread was giving the wrong public impression of MidJourney before it had even officially launched. They didn't know their software could make something like that, because they didn't have the type of minds that had ever even thought to try.

In that moment, when I genuinely surprised and upset the creators of the software, I was able to let go of the nagging feeling I had that "I didn't really make this, the software did" and feel true ownership over my AI work. After all, if the creators of the software didn't even know such art was possible, it went against everything they created the software for, and they rushed to try to prevent it from happening again, then I had truly made something unique to me as an artist, that would have never existed from anyone else. It was a new type of creation, but a very real and personal creation nonetheless. As much of a bummer as it was to find out the creators of the coolest horror art tool I'd ever encountered actively hated horror art, I was empowered and inspired to see what else I could pull out of each new liminal phase of a rapidly-progressing technology.

The Meat Gala series also led to a very cool art collaboration, resulting in something new I'm very excited about that I'll be announcing Monday May 1st, the day of the 2023 MET Gala. Stay tuned!

body horror ai art

reachartwork

pupyjpeg

This is such a bleak intersection of patronizing ableism and reactionary art snobbery, masquerading as progressive art optimism.

"Hey due to paralysis/tremors/muscular+skeletal issues, coding, training, and prompt-writing AI image models are much more accessible to me than other forms of visual art"

"Don't be silly (read: lazy), of course you can make art other ways, you have art in your ~soul~!!!"

It's just classic fuckin "you're not really incapable of things, that would be scary and inconvenient for me, you're actually just different or maybe not trying hard enough!" line that is used any time a disabled person says that they literally can't do something, or need a specific tool to do it.

I hate that this post (with 30k notes no less) is using the "spark of creativity we all have within us" or whatever schmaltzy inspirationbait to obscure the point they're actually making, which is that they think people using AI image models for accessibility reasons —or even just by choice!—are being lazy, not doing real art, and cheating their way into artistic expression; instead they should be eking out whatever they're capable of with limited resources or ability because that's somehow purer or more real than just using a tool that makes things possible for them that weren't before.

Can you imagine if you talked about how a digital camera allowed you to take portraits that you couldn't do otherwise, or just in a way that made you happy, and somebody told you to use paint instead because it doesn't matter how it looks, what matters is that you're expressing yourself, and they simultaneously insinuated you were being lazy? Nobody would like that person, basically everyone would recognize they're a jackass. But if they leaned on already popular conceptions of people using AI tools as cheaters and liars who weren't making "real art", then all of a sudden they're being a brave truth teller and speaking to the powerful artistic strength we all have within us. It makes me sick.

fipindustries

tim-official

^ this shit is so embarrassing man. "destroy artists because they may inspire resistance." not a single fucking bullet point about actual labor concerns. when i say that most anti-ai sentiment is driven by reactionary "art must have a soul" fandom-as-politics shit this is what i mean. and why is there a maple leaf

tim-official

saying things cannot be art because they are "soulless" (which is what i'm specifically referring to, not general belief in "a soul") or do not capture the "human spirit" is one of the main topics that right-wing chuds with roman statues for pfps love to whine about. conservative critics have railed against modern art on these terms for nearly a century. the catholic church explicitly endorses this viewpoint wrt genAI.

my point is: a lot of otherwise liberal, irreligious people who call genAI images "not art" appeal to vague, supernatural "a Real Human must sweat and bleed for the Art to be imbued with the Human Heart and therefore have Value" shit. this is a vocabulary and logic that plays into the hands of christofascist culture war types and how they want "art" to be defined.

bananonbinary

this is also just. blatant conspiracy theory. like it's one thing to say "ai makes search results suck," it's another to say "big tech is intentionally making search results suck to censor knowledge"

like come the fuck on man. get real.

also thats not even what fascism is.

sigmaleph

if 'big tech' wanted to censor knowledge via making search results worse they can just... do that. google doesn't need to throw a couple hundred million usd into Gemini to generate AI slop to pollute search results, they already control search results. because they are google.