Sarah Friend is an artist, technologist, and software developer. She works at the fringes of art, finance, and blockchain technology. For this project, Friend used the generative AI model Stable Diffusion to generate erotic images based on a database of pictures of herself. These images are then put online via social networks that allow interaction with a dedicated audience of fans, who influence future content productions. The work is named Untitled in homage to Andrea Fraser’s seminal 2003 video where Fraser has sex on screen with an art collector who paid $20,000 to participate.
Web 2.0 is driven by publicly sourced content being socially shared, but a coming tsunami of synthetically generated text and images threatens to undermine the social contract of these shared spaces. Erotic and explicit AI-generated images and video combined with digital art markets and the laissez-faire content moderation of the decentralized web threaten further to destabilize consensus reality and public perceptions of trust online. At the same time, erotic content and sex work have been a primary driver of technological innovation and a vital economic lifeline for many, and this market too faces disruption by the enclosure of AI models. Sarah Friends’ experiment with self-sovereignty and the boundaries of identity within the capabilities of these new technologies interrogates both their possibilities and inherent contradictions.