A Work of Artifice: Against algorithmic censorship
I was recently shadow banned on Instagram after posting a photo of one of my finished paintings. The algorithm decided that it was against community guidelines and quietly hid it from view. Another way of saying this is that the AI Bot decided I had stepped out of line, and it silenced me. It hid me from my own followers, no less — people who had opted in to know what I share. It is my job as an artist to push borders, live at the edge and question our culture’s values and guidelines.
What part of my work is so abhorrent and against community? Probably boobs. I will leave the ranting about female equality and body rights for others, but suffice it to say that I have boobs, I love boobs, I paint boobs and that is the least controversial part of my artistic work.
The fact is that I bump against community guidelines in our AI monitored lives every day. I’ve written about my love affair with my Midjourney Bot in past essays. I use the bot to generate imagery from our collective subconscious and explore our hive-mind dream images. Its ability to distill our collective inheritance of imagery into archetypes is profound. To keep the online community safe, Midjourney bans a long list of words that might be used to generate upsetting images. Regardless of whether your account setting is public or private, the list of censored words is the same. Because my work centers around imagination and the border between humans and wild nature, I seem to be particularly good at discovering these words. I use mythological imagery to explore the liminal space between wild and tame, and my image searches find new banned words all the time.
Here is a list of some of my favorite banned words on Midjourney: ass, bare chest, blood, bloodshot, bosom, bra, breasts, cleavage, crucified, cutting, flesh, inappropriate, infected, infested, lingerie, naked, nipple, no shirt, pleasure, sensual, surgery, visceral, whore, wound. Note that images of all of these words are easily found in nearly any edition of National Geographic or Italian Vogue. I discovered that “ass” was a banned word when generating images for The Animals Sick of the Plague from The Original Fables of La Fontaine. These words are at the core of our creation stories, the fairytales that shape our values, and the mythology that makes us human.
The game then becomes telling our stories within the confines of algorithmic boundaries. I can substitute words in my searches, I can hide the controversial bits of my art when I share, I can type my @#$%&! taboo content in creative ways… but the AI, and the minds behind it, have put a kind of natural selection on our content and our culture. I hear artists boasting all the time about “hacking the algorithm” to gain followers. I would argue that we are the ones who have been hacked. We can continue to self-censor our work to please the algorithm, but I would very much like to ask the question of what this artificial intelligence driven, unnatural selection is actually selecting for in our culture. Instagram was particularly “friendly” to artists and has become one of our most important tools for sharing our contributions to culture — but it is undeniable that we artists are evolving in response to its selective pressures.
There has been a lot of conversation among artists worried that AI will replace our work and that AI generated art is inauthentic and missing the humanity that makes art valuable. My question is, how authentic is art that has been filtered to pass censorship? If all we see when we scroll is work that can pass the selective pressures of the algorithm, how human is that feed?
If you want my work unfiltered please join my email list at cammellot.com and then check your spam folders. Wink.