In this era of handwringing over deep fakes and generative art, it’s sometimes worth pausing to reflect that people were already deeply engaged in taking unseemly liberty with celebrity images more than twenty years ago. For example, consider this heavily-edited image dating to 2003. It’s Jessica Alba, only stickier:

jessica alba with cum on her face after bukkake

The source photograph appears to be this one, from Jessica’s Dark Angel period:

Jessica Alba in leather

The self-described “splatter” artist who dirtied up Jessica Alba’s face created dozens or hundreds of such images at the Project Barkley Celebrity Fantasies website, which featured an artist’s statement including this explanation:

When I started faking, I wanted to create something that stood out from the crowd. I found that of non-faked porn, some of the stuff I found most erotic were simple facial aftermath shots. In fact, in review of the jpegs I’d been collecting, one of the best and most memorable images didn’t even have any nude parts showing. I love the formality of this particular image — it looks like a fashion magazine plate, less like a gonzo close-up cumshot as you see in a lot of porn. The eyes in particular say a lot — there’s the light of starry innocence; at the same time, there’s the sated, hypnotized look because just a minute ago, the girl was deepthroating your cock for her life until you couldn’t stand it any more and had to jizz all over her cute little face. Appreciate this photo by staring into the eyes a while, then take a lingering look over the cum…follow the path of wanton pleasure left streaked and dripping on her face…then stare back into the eyes. It’s enough to make most hetero men to pause, take a breath and utter, “Fuck!”

Let’s return for a moment to the new technologies that are thought to be automating and simplifying these sorts of visual remixes. At present none of the best public-facing AI art tools will output erotic imagery; their creators have opted to build #pornocalypse into the products. This will change; in its broadest outlines the technology is open-source. So it shouldn’t be long now before we start seeing unrestricted versions of these tools that can run on consumer hardware. Thus I don’t feel too bad about how I described today’s situation in prospect, the first time I grappled with Project Barkley back in 2004, even though I obviously whiffed the tech specifics:

We now live in a world where your face and mine and Britney’s are all equally fair game: raw material for whatever digital mix might amuse a fickle public. How long until you can beam a mugshot of your cutest co-worker from your phone cam to your DVD player, which will cheerfully paste her facial features onto the lithe body of Vivid’s latest superstar porn model?

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