I work with words.

Feeding terms into the system, I draw out what it makes of a word: its “beauty,” its “body,” its “skin.” No artist names, no reference images, no names of models or actors. Only language. What comes back is not my picture of the world; it’s the system’s. That is exactly what I want to see.

Why work with AI at all?

Because the system is a mirror, and what it reflects is us: our clichés, our skewed representations, our broken image of gender, all of it assembled, statistically, from everything we have already made. I don’t go in to correct it. I go in to look: to follow how the machine sees, and to hold that against how we see. The gap between the two is the work.

Every term I feed, every image pair I rank, every rating round before a new model leaves a faint mark on what the next one will call beautiful, most of all in the early, alpha phases. So the work is also a small deposit in what comes next. And this is what I deposit: we are not smooth, not filtered. We are marked, freckled, spotted, sweaty, and the system can be asked to keep that.

AI slop is not inevitable.

We assume the photograph is honest and the render is a lie, but the image most of us actually live among has been smoothed, slimmed, emptied of pores long before it reaches us. Not by the photographer, but by everything that comes after the shutter: the retouch, the standard, the campaign. A render, asked for texture, can hold more of a real face than that.

This is the question that keeps me here: not whether an image is real, but which image tells the truth about a body. The artificial one can stand beside the real, not against it, and sometimes carry what the real was talked out of showing.

In that sense I am training two systems at once: the algorithm, and the eye it teaches. Stepping back from AI does not leave the picture neutral; it only hands it to someone else. Corporations will use it to shape what we see, the way advertising and social media already have. I would rather keep a hand in it. Because the image, made or photographed, goes straight to the optic nerve — beneath thought, before judgment.