Selfies, Artificial Intelligence, and Porn
Arvida Byström’s new art book of AI-manipulated nude images challenges the gaze and exploitation in the digital age.
- Text: Liara Roux
- Art courtesy of: Arvida Byström
Arvida Byström is an edgelord. That is, her art teeters on the edge of what society considers tolerable. Her latest project is a photobook, In the Clouds, which documents her social experiment on an OnlyFans-like platform and combines three hot-button issues: selfies, artificial intelligence, and pornography. She used an AI “nudifying” application to generate artificial nudes which she sent to paying customers; as the project went on, the nudes became increasingly glitchy and bizarre. Predictably, the book has caused a bit of an upset online and offline. Sex workers criticized Byström for using generative-image models that appropriated their labor without compensation. Art world insiders tried to have a forthcoming exhibition shut down, complaining to the museum that her work is pornography, not art. Both are missing the point.
Art is not about striving for moral purity. Provocative art, at its best, holds a mirror to the self and to society. While the AI image generators Byström utilizes are certainly exploitative, her work clearly problematizes that exploitation. By using them, she makes herself complicit, but no more so than anyone else who’s used ChatGPT or any of the other AI tools that are readily available online. Which is many of us, myself included.
Ryder Ripps, another infamous edgelord, paid sex workers $50 to draw with crayons for his residency at the Ace Hotel in 2014. He called this project ART WHORE. Afterward, he was rightfully ripped to shreds. It was in poor taste, but more importantly, it was boring. Conceptually it was an empty husk and his weak attempts to contextualize the piece with talk of art world exploitation did little to help his case. Byström, on the other hand, has created something far more interesting, something that delineates exactly why these AI tools must be criticized: They’re fundamentally extractive, using the labor and intellectual property of everyone who’s ever posted online without compensation. By using her own body and face, in addition to the appropriated bodies of sex workers, she exploits herself as well.
Liara Roux
Arvida Byström
What drew you to this project?
My work usually involves feminized digital elements, like Apple’s Siri and AI sex dolls. In November I saw a tweet that complained about ads for “nudifying” platforms. Around that time I had been working with DALL-E’s Out-Paint tool, which could be described as a tool for collaging with AI. You upload a photo or a painting and then edit it with AI. These “nudifying” platforms reminded me of photography collage. The results are actually quite realistic, so I became interested in messing with the platform and creating more grotesque, glitchy results. Then Sunroom [an OnlyFans competitor] got in touch and offered me a sponsorship deal. It seemed like an interesting way to explore the new landscape of influencer sex work.
AI is trained on unpaid, appropriated imagery scraped from the web; how did it feel to combine your body with the bodies of other women? In the Clouds reminded me of Philippe Parreno’s work with his character Annlee. He’s appropriating the image of a girl. It’s a cartoon, but still, he’s a middle-aged white man who’s using this young Asian girl as a mouthpiece. What he’s doing is different from what Disney and Hollywood in general does: directors, producers, screenwriters putting words in the mouths of others. Your work also plays with this discomfort.
I wanted to call attention to the complicated financial side of AI: Who gets the money from these tools? In this case, these tools are made from images of uncompensated sex workers scraped from pirated pornographic videos, and by the exploited and underpaid workers who are categorizing the data for these systems. So why is Google making all the money? What does this dataset tell us about which bodies are considered beautiful or “normative?”
My previous work had dealt with sexuality, and while it wasn’t made to be pornography, I know people have used it for that purpose. I’m not anti-porn, but I spend a lot of time thinking about the effect of these idealized, sexualized images of women we see in advertising, on social media, and in pornography. My work exists in this problematized space. I’m not trying to make art that is “good” or “bad,” ethically speaking. I want to make people question their responses to this imagery.
I met with an institution the other week. They wanted to work with me, but they told me that curators were calling them to say they shouldn’t because I’ve made pornography. It made me so angry. The pornography was made for an art project, of course, but that shouldn’t change anything. The framing of this project is not to distance myself from the act of creating pornography, it’s to question our changing perception of pornography after the introduction of AI image generation. It made me so angry, in part, because I’ve done other work that I think is way more problematic. I’d understand if these institutions were upset about my commercial work. To me, that feels much more ethically dubious.
It’s especially frustrating because this project, which is obviously political, forces people to question how they’re using these tools. Part of this work will be “problematic”—I don’t mean to imply that you shouldn’t have made this art. Many people create AI art without nudity; because your work uses imagery from an industry plagued with exploitation and piracy—sex work—it becomes immediately obvious how problematic the appropriation of these images by these tech companies is. Your work evokes a visceral emotional response. That’s valuable.
Right now, all of the money in the economy goes straight to the top. If everyone was financially stable, then AI wouldn’t be the issue that it is. It would just be an interesting tool. When the DJ came to be, a lot of live bands were really upset because they lost their jobs. Does that mean DJs shouldn’t exist? No. There’s no inherent issue with people enjoying computer-generated work. But we should preserve the craft involved in live music and ensure live performers are able to receive government funding, because it would be a tragedy if live music went extinct.
AI can only go so far: It will always mirror history. Someone needs to be doing the work to create new datasets. If someone wanted to make more realistic lesbian porn, for example, with bodies that are more representative of the general population, then they will need to make it from scratch. Right now, there’s not enough of this type of pornography to effectively train a neural net. That’s a problem.
What was your emotional experience selling these generated images on a sex work platform?
I still have so many conflicting feelings about it. The artificial nudity never bothered me; photography is already a medium that lies, in that it appears to be documentary but is actually manufactured. The artifice of AI just pushes further themes I had already been exploring in my photography.
I was pleasantly surprised by my clientele on the fan site. There were a few assholes, but generally the people who signed up were invested in connecting with me as an artist. It was surprising how many men were seeking therapy. Many of my clients bonded with this AI character as they chatted with her. Towards the end of the project, as I began to send more glitchy messages and imagery, most clients didn’t point out that the images weren’t anatomically correct.
They were invested in the fantasy.
Men are supposed to be unemotional about sex. But they are emotionally invested in it.
Did this project change your perspective on sex work?
I come from Sweden, which has the infamous Swedish model. It’s problematic and causes issues for sex workers, but at its core, it doesn’t place the blame at the feet of sex workers. Even when I was younger, I never thought there was anything wrong with sex workers themselves. If anything, this project changed my view of clients. I was surprised at how respectful many of them were. But this is complicated: I was in a less precarious position than many sex workers are. I’m working online and I’m not reliant on this platform to financially support myself, so I can afford to turn down more dangerous requests. I also wasn’t directly chatting with the clients myself; they were chatting with an AI bot, who was happy to be nice and subservient.
For many people sex work is traumatizing, but for me it wasn’t. I had shitty clients and bad days, but it suited me better than other work.
Exactly. I don’t like to speak too broadly about sex work. It’s like freelance jobs in general, maybe, in that when you’re in a precarious position you feel pressure to accept low wages. My early days as a photographer were horrible for my health. These digital platforms feel like a very specific type of celebrity sex work.
A lot of people don’t know this, but many celebrities do escort. There’s this massive agency in the United States that works with C-list actresses, influencers, models. It’s all very private of course. There’s a lot of hidden sex work in the art world as well. Part of the outrage in response to projects like yours comes from these transactional relationships being made so overt.
I understand why people think sex work is problematic, but they need to consider the realities of the lives of sex workers. Of course in an ideal dream world no one would do any work they’re uncomfortable with. But that’s not the world we are living in. How do we deal with that? Is the answer to be so judgemental? People want black and white answers about these things, but there aren’t any. It is absurd to think that sex workers don’t have anything valuable to bring to the conversation. The art sex workers make is so valuable.
I’m curious if Amalia Ulman’s work Excellences and Perfections came to mind as you were working on this project—it feels like there are some parallels there.
Definitely. We both explore the nature of “reality” online. Excellences and Perfections was performed exactly a decade ago. So much has changed in the past decade; how bodies are perceived, how platforms work. More and more content online is fake now. So many people have no idea how hard it is to validate what’s truthful, to see past these parasocial relationships we develop on social media or on sites like OnlyFans. How important is reality on platforms where fantasy is for sale?
People were very critical of Ulman’s work for being condescending, but she was actually working as a sugar baby at that time. Was the work condescending, or was she making fun of the people who were making fun of her? I wonder how much of the condescension people perceived is because of how curators presented it. As you’ve experienced, institutions will actively discriminate against pornography; they don’t take it seriously. This forces many artists to perform conceptual gymnastics to differentiate themselves.
Many curators want me to take a more dogmatic stance. Sometimes people ask about my work as though I think I’m somehow better than these other, vapid women. I’m like, I am a vapid woman! This is my practice. It’s complex. I’m not taking a stance, I’m not making fun of people. My work sometimes grosses people out, and maybe it is grotesque, but personally, I find every image I make beautiful in some way.
Just yesterday I finished reading Philippa Snow’s Trophy Lives—it’s a fantastic book about art and celebrity and performance. She writes about Amalia’s work but she also writes about Paris Hilton as a performance artist, that Paris Hilton has been doing performance art for decades performing as this blonde bimbo Paris Hilton, which is very different from the woman Paris Hilton is behind closed doors. These women who perform vapidity are usually very smart and very calculating in their performance. You have a lot of power over people if they think they’re smarter than you.
In the art world, if you’re hot, you’re supposed to dress down. Because I don’t, people think it’s a satirical performance. It’s not that deep. Maybe I like dressing up and bleaching my hair and doing my makeup. People sometimes think I dress the way I do to differentiate myself, to show I’m not like other girls. But I don’t mind being a part of the other girls. They aren’t people I want to distance myself from.
Liara Roux is a writer and sex worker. Her memoir Whore of New York was published in 2021; these days, she lives in Paris with her beautiful dog.
- Text: Liara Roux
- Art courtesy of: Arvida Byström
- Date: June 4, 2024
