Why Arvida Byström is selling uncanny AI-generated nudes
In The Clouds (published by Nuda) is a pocket-sized book featuring over 200 images from the project, as well as essays from the likes of Slavoj Žižek, C/M Edenborg and Olivia Kan-Sperling. Originally sold under the pretence that they were real, the nudes on show come in many different forms, some rendering the Byström’s body to porn-perfect standards (“it has consistently made my boobs bigger), while others take a weirder turn, challenging the idea of what’s hot with creaturesque forms featuring mono-boobs and garbled proportions. “The strange ones I relate to as myself more,” she affirms.
“I truly hope some people will jerk off to [the book], especially to the really weird photos” – Arvida Byström
This is particularly interesting when you look at how AI depicts the female form, and its tendency to mirror society’s beauty standards, while also generating images that are particularly X-rated. “It’s clearly trained on pornographic images because the ones where it looks like I’m being fucked by a dildo it’s just me holding like a dildo in front of my underwear or whatever I’m wearing,” she shares. Even the images that appear explicitly machine-generated are still desirable, albeit in an uncanny way. “I truly hope some people will jerk off to [the book], especially to the really weird photos.”
With AI, the line between what’s real and artificial is already becoming increasingly blurred, mutating the ways we see ourselves and others. “The sad part about it is how they’re making beauty standards more complex,” Byström muses. This can admittedly move in a number of ways, either accelerating existing beauty norms (as per the rise of AI influencers), or creating artificial desires so extreme that they can only exist inside our screens. “Maybe when you meet a human you want something that’s actually more human. Or maybe we get so oversaturated with this normative beauty that it’s no longer interesting to us anymore.”
In The Clouds [published by Nuda] is available to order here now.
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- Source of information and images “dazeddigital”“
