Elf Sternberg

Have you ever looked up the definition of beauty? The dictionary will tell you that beauty is “a combination of qualities such as shape, color, or form that pleases the senses.” These qualities are context-sensitive, since a beautiful man or woman is a different sort of judgment from a beautiful bit of architecture or a beautiful view, but they do have their similarities and psychologists have done a lot of work to quantify those similarities.

I’ve been playing with Stable Diffusion, the AI “art generation” program that has artists and illustrators panicked, and rightly so as I fear it really will create a market of “mechanically produced” art every bit as meaningful as a grocery store frozen dinner is nutritious.

Stable Diffusion is a search engine for a “model”; a model is a file containing upwards of 8Gigabytes of tiny little bits of knowledge about all the pictures and text describing those pictures that have been fed into the search engine. The act of creating an image is known as “prompting”; the search engine takes the text of a prompt and a few internally generated random numbers and assembles images which, if fed back into the search engine, would probably have the same text as what you gave it.

Despite this randomness, Stable Diffusion is extremely popular with pornography hounds. There’s one obvious reason for this– with a little cleverness that has everything to do with patience and nothing to do with talent it can produce images that the viewer enjoys and that he would never actually commission in real life, either because he’s too cheap or because he wouldn’t want to share his particular kink with the rest of the world.

But there’s another, deeper reason Stable Diffusion is so popular with smut fans, and it’s about beauty.

For the human form, the two qualities that consistently rate high as “beautiful” are youth and health. There’s massive amounts of grey matter in our brains dedicated to identifying other people, and those two qualities spark responses in that grey matter like almost no other. This isn’t to say that if you’re an older person you can’t be beautiful, but if you are an older person and you’ve “let yourself go,” well, you’re not going to have other people giving you second glances for the pleasure of it.

Beauty in the wider world is also characterized by two seemingly contradictory features: repetition and novelty. The human brain wants to know that the world is orderly and functional and healthy, so it looks to see that there is rhythm and repetition, that a beautiful landscape is consistent and expected; it also wants to believe that it is natural and changing and still healthy, so it looks for the rigidity of artifice and the sharp angles of decay sticking out, and registers whether or not the organic novelty is a sign of growth and bounty.

It is this combination of youth, health, repetition and novelty that Stable Diffusion exploits to a degree never before seen. Feel free to click on the image to the right; there is no nudity in it, although there is skin and lingerie.

AIBot is a Stable Diffusion master who posts regularly to his account, and he understands this vulnerability better than any other. Some men just want to drown in the physical beauty of women and AIBot (and many, many, many others just like him) (warning: those links are probably NSFW) know it, enjoy it, and exploit the hell out of Stable Diffusion’s ability to create literal oceans of pretty girls so they can enjoy it and share that pleasure with others.

It is this ability to hit all the high points of the human brain’s expectation of “beauty” that makes AI image generation so compelling. We’ve all seen pretty people and watched them from time to time; Victoria’s Secret and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Annuals, not to mention Playboy, Penthouse, and all of their competitors were entirely financed by men’s urge to to do just that. What is new is the ability to create so much repetition and novelty on demand, fitting one’s fetishes and desires exactly, but with much more volume than any one artist or photographer would be willing to produce. It is a completely unprecedented phenomenon and this combination of being able to see your specialized desires in secret and generate an infinite amount of such images probably accounts for those people who describe themselves already as "addicted" to Stable Diffusion.

Now, I don’t want to go off on the idea that Stable Diffusion is a danger to human beings the way anti-pornography nuts like to depict it, saying “Never before in the history of mankind have we been exposed to so much nudity, and it’s bad for our brains.” I don’t believe that at all. I just think that when we read about AI illustration, we should be aware that the people producing those images are trying to hack our brains in new and interesting ways, and we should be aware that these exploits exist and think harder about indulging in them.