Succumbing to the Machine: Desire in the Age of AI

In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by artist Erin Robinson. Her work, XXX Machina, operates as an autonomous desire machine that generates an endless stream of synthetic erotic imagery. They discuss desire, eroticism, human intimacy, and corporeality from Lacan and Bataille, all the way to today's shift brought by artificial intelligence.

Host: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Yazdan Zand
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Resources:
Erotics of the Synthetic Self: Fragmentation, Excess, and the Automation of Desire in XXX Machina

Transcript

Erin Robinson: This exploration started with seeing how easily AI pushed my face into pornographic scenes without really needing to be asked. This really showed how quickly the female body became readable to the system as a site of projection for eroticism. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to Art is Not a Thing, the podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world building. My name is Ana Carabelea, and on this podcast, I talk to artists and researchers whose work questions and reimagines our practices in and of the world. 

In this episode, I'm joined by artist Erin Robinson. Her work, XXX Machina explores how artificial intelligence disrupts and reshapes erotic desire, identity and human intimacy. Operating as an autonomous desire machine, the work generates synthetic erotic imagery: deep-fake renderings utilising the artist's face, through recursive processes of algorithmic diffusion models. Initially resembling conventional explicit imagery, closer inspection reveals disturbing visual ruptures and bodily impossibilities: bodies fragment and recombine unpredictably, detaching from stable corporeal reference into uncanny and surreal assemblages. 

Welcome Erin, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a great pleasure to have you.  

Erin: Yes, thank you for having me. Excited to be here. 

Ana: So, for starters, I wanted to give listeners a bit more context and invite you to tell us what is XXX Machina? 

Erin: I think you've summed up really nicely there. It's an immersive installation which functions as an autonomous desire machine. So, it's a system which generates endless deep fake porn of myself. And it does this through tracking themes from a dataset we made from a popular AI pornography website–so a website where people can go on to generate their own porn. We've used natural language processing on the prompts to identify themes and clusters across these and have built a system to endlessly generate across trends. How the images get generated themselves, is they go through a recursive process where I feedback images that have been previously made, into ones that are being currently made to disrupt what the model knows about the body. And in the end of that, I also insert my own identity into these as well. So, the experience of seeing this is a very fast moving, very saturated flood of porn that is of me, that, at a first look, looks fairly standard and has the normal erotic cues of regular porn but as you look closer, you realize that the bodies are very distorted and fragmented. 

Ana: I want to ask a provocative question now, but I feel like it's a question that might be at the back of a lot of people's minds. What is the difference between porn and art? And where does this work sit? Is it art? Is it “just” porn? 

Erin: Yeah, I mean, it is a good question. And I think often we have a desire to sort things into categories. And in the case of porn, this is especially true. Online we see different spaces where media within these spaces are either delineated as porn or not porn. And this is a very hard infrastructural distinction. And then we also have art and not art. And here I think it's really the artistic institutions who get to decide whether something is art or not. Then once a work, whether it's erotic or not, is institutionalized as art, this is just kind of like widely accepted. But then I think this distinction is important to talk about because in my opinion, there's not such a clear delineation or distinction between art and porn. This is clear when you get into the actual definitions of these distinctions that have been laid out by theorists. There's one person who I want to talk about, a theorist called Gary Needham, who says that there's three different types of distinction to whether something can be art or porn. The first is aesthetic–formal art technique and art aesthetic is more likely to be delineated as art. In this kind of vein, realistic images or photography are more likely to be nominated as porn. I think he says that in the case of photography a penis is a penis, not a brush stroke. So, there's an aesthetic distinction.  

There's also a philosophical distinction where several theorists have kind of said that art is for the brain and porn is for the body. So, people think they serve different functions. 

And then there's also the political and policy led distinctions on whether something is porn. And I know that in the UK there's quite strict definitions as to what is allowed in certain online spaces and what is not. However, with those distinctions, you can see that there's not really a clear defining separation between what art and porn is. It crosses boundaries and it's very different under different settings. And with this work, I kind of see that too. I consider this piece [to be] both things at the same time. I think that distinction or not having that distinction there is really important to me. I know that the artifacts from this work have been consumed as both porn and art by different people. Because the work uses the aesthetic logic of porn, the images that it gives back are realistic, they're not painterly. All the images are actually derived from real prompts people have used to generate porn and the work also uses commercial models also used to generate porn. But at the same time, I'm artistically intervening in that structure to hopefully open up philosophical questions, and it has been institutionalized and shown as art in galleries. I think it's important to me that the work can still be read as pornographic even in gallery settings. I'm not really interested in like rescuing explicit imagery from pornography by laundering or sanitising it for lack of better word through art, but more finding the channels to bring it into gallery spaces to push boundaries of erotic discourse, but also, the forms of expression and exploration that we can have with explicit imagery and our own bodies in the gallery. 

Ana: Great, thank you. I kind of want to pick up on the point that it's important to not rescue the artwork, to not sanitise it too much and ask you to talk a bit about the choice to use images of yourself for the work. Aside from the fact that there are clear ethical issues with using someone else's image, I think the work also points to older debates around sex work, pornography where they're read either as empowerment or self-exploitation and how questions like who uses who, who has agency, who does the gaze belong to resurface in the age of AI deepfakes. And I wanted to ask how the work sits in relation to those logics. 

Erin: This exploration started with seeing how easily AI pushed my face into pornographic scenes without really needing to be asked when I was using it as a mode for self-exploration and exploring self-portrait with AI. And I think this really showed how quickly the female body became readable to the system as a site of projection for eroticism. And for me, that brought up a mixture of curiosity, also made me feel quite uncomfortable, but I didn't want to step back, and I wanted to lean into that and explore it a little bit more. Because I think when you choose to combine yourself with an AI model, you are performing yourself but the model is also performing you in a sense. So it comes with its own biases, its own ideas about what you should appear to look like or what women should appear to look like. And so, it was interesting in this kind of hybrid self that I could develop through exploring what systems had codified as pornographic or sexy and how it would respond to my image as well. 

But the piece is more personal than that as well. I mean, (...) I was developing this piece during a period of my life which was quite fragmentary and my sense of self was quite unstable. And so, this kind of like fragmentation and replication and duplication across all of these different kind of collected desires, I felt kind of matched my state of fragmentation in the body. I find that experience quite empowering but also self-exploitative at the same time. I guess like many forms of sexual performance, it involved a negotiation between self-expression and them becoming available to the desires of others. And the latter is what I feel like is happening on scale here, both by kind of succumbing to the collective fantasy of real people that I have derived from these prompts, but also to the biases and the idea of the model. But on the other hand, in terms of this empowerment and self-exploration, I think the work became a site of erotic exploration for me. I think this becomes clear in how I use Bataille to frame his ideas of eroticism. For him and for me personally eroticism is tied to a loss of control, but more than that to the self losing its usual coherence and moving towards something looser. Yeah, it's one of the spaces where I feel the boundary of the self loosen and the body becomes open to fantasy and surrender and a kind of psychic disorganization. So, in that sense, submitting my image to the machine operating outside of my own autonomy felt expressive and almost ritualistic in an erotic way. And so, I think for me, what's happening in this piece is there's several forms of fragmentation at once that can't really be separated free from each other. And the first is the psychic fragmentation that accompanies eroticism and my own self exploration and the side that I find empowering. And then the second is the fragmentation of the self across endless projected fantasies, which I guess is self-exploitative in a way and submitting to the machine. And then the literal fragmentation of bodies in the work, which become distorted and dismembered, which mirrors the model's own internal logic. 

Yeah, so in that way, these all being folded together in a way which, I guess can be read as both. I find it both empowering and exploitative at the same time and the experience of seeing myself fragmented across that in that way... I mean, I was looking at porn myself all day, every day for a good number of months. And yeah, I think I entered a bit of a weird AI fever dream. But for me, the kind of the fragmentationary logic of eroticism, of AI and of this idea of the body being spent through digital media and circulated and eaten up and repeated again, all kind of found this similar home within each other. And I think this is probably the experience of lots of people online, especially curating a self-image, kind of posting and wasting and consuming images as well. 

Yeah, so all these elements in the piece kind of intensified and mirrored one another, which I personally found quite interesting how kind of embedded we are into these structures of circulation and how we organize our brains like that. 

[Music] 

Ana: Erin Robinson is an award-winning computational artist and researcher whose work examines how eroticism, identity and embodiment are rewritten through algorithmic systems. She treats AI as both instrument and subject, working with synthetic images, surveillance architecture and data driven models to study how bodies are fragmented, reconstructed and circulated. Across installation, image and 3D, she develops frameworks that expose the technical and libidinal logics shaping contemporary visual culture. Her practice moves between critical theory and hands on computation, using her own body as a site for testing how desire, authorship and agency shift within synthetic media. 

[Music] 

Ana: Speaking about this logic of AI, I also wanted to touch on the question of desire. In the essay that was, I guess, accompanying the piece, you speak about this sort of continuity between how Lacan understands desire and the ways in which algorithms now organize desire, but also how desire mutates under these new conditions. And I wanted to maybe unpack that a bit more. What has always been there in terms of how we understand desire's mechanisms and what changes now under these new conditions? 

Erin: Yeah, so in reference to Lacan, I kind of went off two different things that he talks about in relation to desire and how AI kind of encapsulates that and shows it in the internal structure of how it works, especially with AI porn. One of them is Lacan's partial objects. Lacan speaks about desire being attached to partial objects of people rather than ever being directed at a whole, fully coherent person. And so that means that desire attaches to a fragment about someone else, something about the other. So, it could be the mouth, the breast, the voice. And this is something which we know to be true because it's already very evident in visual media, in the way that advertising, celebrity culture and pornography all kind of disaggregate the body into desirable parts, especially when it comes to women, and objectifies them. And these separate body parts are staged to function as signifiers of the desire of the other and kind of partial objects that stand in for the missing object of fantasy in the psyche. So yeah, I guess an example of that is advertising. So instead of advertising a product directly, say it's like a perfume advert or something, campaigns graft it onto the viewer's circuit of desire by attaching the product to disaggregated body parts like the legs or other general erotic or libidinal fragments. The body part becomes a metonym for the commodity itself, so that to possess the product is to possess the fragmentary erotic quality or object of desire that has been made to signify it. This is fairly similar to how generative AI models work, image models work in their internal logic. They also don't understand the human as a complete and whole being. They learn distributions of features and how they co-occur together and then synthesize these images through recombination, kind of like building a human by Lego bricks. In that way, our fragmentary logic desire stays the same. But at the same time, I think also when deepfakes are becoming a lot more common, or AI porn in general is becoming a lot more common, I think that probably has its consequences. So, these partial objects of desire become increasingly detached from any real human reference or subject and start to circulate as modular codes of desirability in their own right. So, what gets amplified then are these codes within the images, like breasts, waists, lips, submissiveness even, like in AI girlfriends and chatbots. And all these cues of femininity now get exaggerated, packaged, optimized and distributed across the web. 

So, in that case, they feed back into culture kind of at scale. And I think that could have the potential to change and see how we organize our view, particularly of women, but also of sex. I mean, for example, we already know that porn has changed the way that we conceptualize sex and our expectations of what that looks like in real life. I think the exaggeration of these codified ideas of eroticism and of womanhood through AI could push that further.  

The second continuity with Lacan's ideas is that desire is structured by lack. In his account, he says that desire is sustained by what remains missing or withheld out of reach. In real life terms, that means something about the other person that you desire remains opaque. There's a delay, there's uncertainty, there's some kind of friction in fulfilling that desire. And I think in the context of these AI systems, these technical infrastructures seem to promise the opposite: endless accessibility, endless capitulation of whatever fantasy you have at the tip of your fingers. But in actuality, they don't remove that internal lack. But they do remove the delay and the opacity and the difficulty of the other person. Instead, what they produce is this drive loop: more images, more explicitness, more permutations, and more seeking that perfect fantasy through kind of endless iteration, endless consumption. But it's one that brings no final satisfaction. You'll never be able to quite satisfy that thing that is just out of reach. And I think the speculative risk here is that people might start to seek satisfaction through the machine itself, and not because it resolves desire, but because it offers this like frictionless loop of responsiveness and customization that might begin to substitute for the friction, the real body and lived experience and personhood of another person. 

Ana: Finally, I also wanted to ask, how do you think the spread of deepfake images affects real people and in particular women? Because I feel like (...) they're disproportionately represented in these images. 

Erin: Yeah, so women are hugely overrepresented in AI generated images, particularly pornographic ones. There's a statistic that around 98% of AI generated deepfakes online are pornographic, and out of those 99% of them are of women. So, there's a huge disbalance in gender there and who is being mediated by AI and whose bodies are being changed through this mediation of AI. And really, I think AI is intensifying a much older imbalance here. Women are still far more likely to be made into objects of the gaze than men are. 

This is very evident in the art world where women have been long overrepresented as nude subjects while being underrepresented as makers. I think what's really frightening about these AI services that allow you to make deepfake pornographic images is that you no longer need this formal artistic skill or to be physically present with a woman if you wanted to take an unconsensual picture of her. But you can now generate sexualized images of women that you know and don't know with extraordinary ease and an enormous scale. These images can be made very quickly, cheaply,and when you're alone inside your house, and that capacity has been used overwhelmingly to harm women, in particular. 

However, there's another point which I find really interesting is that through things like pornographic deepfakes, the image of the woman is being violently extracted from. But the imagery of women is also increasingly used to extract from other people. And we see this in the rise of AI influencers, AI girlfriends and chatbots who are still predominantly women on the internet and who are extracting from men predominantly. So, the question of who is using who that I feel like I try and explore in my work as well is part of a much wider digital economy of desire and extraction. 

Ana: Thank you. That's super interesting. We're at the end of today's episode, unfortunately. Thank you so much for joining me today, Erin. It was an absolute pleasure to have you here and great chatting with you. 

Erin: Yes, you too. 

Ana: That’s it for today. Thank you for tuning in! Join us next month for a new episode, and in the meantime, follow us or share the show with someone you think might like it.