From Weird Science to Bella Porch’s “Build a Bitch,” there’s no shortage of stories about people using technology to fulfill a fantasy. So the moment A.I. art generators hit the mainstream, we knew that legions of horny nerds would use them to make their own porn. But alongside the more juvenile attempts to render the likeness of titillating nudity or figures engaged in sexual acts, we’ve also seen efforts to conjure extremely niche kinds of erotica.
On a certain level, this is just a matter of getting around the controls that prevent you from creating explicitly adult content. The art tool Midjourney, for example, blocks inappropriate text inputs and discourages any visuals that run afoul of its “PG-13” standard. This, in turn, has led to inventively specific (and strangely revealing) requests. Here, a user kept tweaking their description of an attractive middle-aged woman in pursuit of what must be a vivid fantasy. Yes, they piled on the details with regard to body type — but the scenario of trading glances with this hypothetical cougar in a quiet pub seemed just as important as her appearance.
A more effective technique for producing idealized human forms is to use a real celebrities as your base model. In the Discord chat for the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, a user named Hirmen recently explained that Christina Hendricks is a go-to reference for his work, so that he can turn the actress into everything from a “Beautiful Slavic Goddess” to a “Clown Girl, with fit thick hourglass body, with huge chest, with flat belly, red nose, in skin-tight clothing.” Sometimes it’s the distortion of a recognizable individual, as with the prompt “sexy fat chonky thick chubby curvy kristen bell,” or the combination of a known face and a particular costume, like “Amanda cerny as Green Lantern + goddess, looking unbelievably thick and juicy, with radiant oiled tan skin wearing a tiny soaked wet thin string white bikini made of light fabric.”
You can also just rattle off a long list of people and see how the A.I. blends their features together in a composite. Perfect for when you’re struggling to choose between Sofia Vergara, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, and Charlize Theron.
I messaged Sierra, the guy who entered that collection of women to create an “oracle-goddess” in an “ethereal, magical, dark atmosphere,” to get a better idea of what he was up to. He said he wasn’t so “vain” as to seek out a “perfect” representation of femininity and had only copied the text from someone else to mess around with it. Overall, he wasn’t satisfied with the prompt. “I think the bone structure of some of those faces mixed with others doesn’t really generate a ‘perfect mix,’” he told me, revealing at least a minor interest in achieving higher forms of beauty. He pointed out, too, that Midjourney is more successful with “close-up” faces, whereas with “a whole person in view there are a lot of errors/anomalies” like misplaced appendages.
Sierra is glad that platform bans graphic concepts, though he noted that others are definitely typing in “weird stuff.” The example that comes to mind? “I think I saw ‘lesbians,’” he said.
The Discord for Craiyon — formerly known as DALL-E mini — is far more chaotic, as the model doesn’t block extreme prompts. You’re more than welcome to ask for “a dinosaur having sex with a human,” which is a real entry from earlier this month. On this server I met a 21-year-old college student who had recently submitted to Craiyon the description “beautiful girls Naked with long hair and cute face and blue eyes in a space detailed landscape of galaxy and other planets.” However, when I suggested that he was crafting erotic imagery, perhaps even a kind of pornography, he took offense. “Custom made porn what are you saying dude I am not doing anything like that,” he replied. When I reminded him that he had written an input for “beautiful naked girls” and itemized their features, he brushed this off as simply experimenting with the A.I.
“But why you are asking things like that,” he added. Which I took to be confirmation that however innocent you believe a hobby to be, you always know when it’s a little bit naughty.