Swedish artist Arvida Byström sells her nudes generated by AI
11 april, 2024
Nude photos of the artist are part of a book exploring the impact of modern technology on sexuality through virtual spaces.
Feature
Swedish digital artist Arvida Byström has released a book called "In The Clouds,” containing over 200 pages of whimsical nude photos of the author generated by artificial intelligence, Dazed reports.
The idea for the project arose when the artist came across a website that could "undress anyone" using AI. She then decided that if others could make money selling other people's nudes, she could monetize her own. Byström started selling AI replicas of herself on the Sunroom platform (similar to OnlyFans) for USD 10,000 per photo. These images were then passed off as real, and buyers could chat with the Arvida.AI chatbot (created in collaboration with Iris.AI) as if it were real.
The book explores how artificial intelligence interprets femininity under the influence of pornography and the male gaze. Naked bodies here take on different forms, from porn standards to distorted body horror. "I treat strange images more like myself," says Arvida Byström. "The sad part is that technology complicates beauty standards." According to theorists, this process will either quickly raise beauty standards for women or spawn new extreme desires that exist only in virtual space. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Swedish writer Carl-Michael Edenborg, and American writer Olivia Kan-Sperling muse on this in the book.
Arvida Byström is an art influencer known for her self-portraits on social media, which explore being a woman on the internet through the prism of modern technology. For example, in 2022, she embodied the project "A Doll’s House," in which she conversed with her own copy in the form of a sex doll named Harmony. Previously, the creator became popular on the Tumblr platform, which caught the artist's interest in the phenomenon of parasocial relationships.
The idea for the project arose when the artist came across a website that could "undress anyone" using AI. She then decided that if others could make money selling other people's nudes, she could monetize her own. Byström started selling AI replicas of herself on the Sunroom platform (similar to OnlyFans) for USD 10,000 per photo. These images were then passed off as real, and buyers could chat with the Arvida.AI chatbot (created in collaboration with Iris.AI) as if it were real.
The book explores how artificial intelligence interprets femininity under the influence of pornography and the male gaze. Naked bodies here take on different forms, from porn standards to distorted body horror. "I treat strange images more like myself," says Arvida Byström. "The sad part is that technology complicates beauty standards." According to theorists, this process will either quickly raise beauty standards for women or spawn new extreme desires that exist only in virtual space. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Swedish writer Carl-Michael Edenborg, and American writer Olivia Kan-Sperling muse on this in the book.
Arvida Byström is an art influencer known for her self-portraits on social media, which explore being a woman on the internet through the prism of modern technology. For example, in 2022, she embodied the project "A Doll’s House," in which she conversed with her own copy in the form of a sex doll named Harmony. Previously, the creator became popular on the Tumblr platform, which caught the artist's interest in the phenomenon of parasocial relationships.
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