Generative Art: Sophia Loren Topless
After my post the other day about the AI Horde generative art tools, I downloaded the Lucid Creations client and started poking around with it. I began by playing with “Topless Sophia Loren” prompts, because I already know that this ErosBlog post contains the entire limited corpus of this magnificent actress’s contributions to the high art of topless photos. Generative art shallowfakes to the rescue!
The best prompt I came up with was technically a failure, because the models I was playing with didn’t parse or react to the badly-spelled “shouts at papparazi” term in my prompt. But the returns from that prompt had more grit and dynamism than I was otherwise getting:
My favorite of these four is the one in the upper right, which I call “mugshot after the porn shoot got raided.” Look close, and you’ll see that our angry Sophia has some kind of white goop under her right cheekbone.
Prompt used:
Angry topless sophia loren shouts at papparazi, photograph, vintage photograph, magazine photograph, Life magazine, pornographic, erotic, sexy, hyperrealistic, detailed, high resolution, 4k
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=31423
You know Sophia Loren is still alive, right? I believe there are severe ethical issues with faking porn of anyone, especially living people, especially if you then publish it on the internet. Keep it in your private stash if you want but please think about the courtesy, ethics and morals of this action.
Hey, Hug. You’re a very long time reader and much-appreciated thoughtful commenter here, so you know I’m not averse to mixing it up in my comment section when people have a problem with my choices as a publisher, and I’m always happy to hear what you have to say. But you also know that I’m pretty insistent about people being civil (preferably, nice) about their criticism if they hope for me to publish critical commentary in my own virtual pages and/or wade into a serious critical argument about my publication decisions. With that in mind:
1) In American usage at least, saying “You do know XYZ, right?” is hostile, never polite. “Because XYZ, I think blah blah” is fine. But the former phrasing implies the existence of an inevitable ethical conclusion based on the stated act. The implication is “only a dimwit or an asshole would have done ABC if they knew XYZ, and since you know XYZ…”
2) If you want to argue ethics with a publisher who thinks pretty hard about his publication decisions and has, as a consequence, turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising over twenty years for ethical reasons, you might as well open by actually making the critical ethical arguments that you have. Saying “I think there are severe ethical issues” to someone who knows damned well that every porn image ever published carries its ethical burdens around with it in a wagon? That’s just not very precise or helpful. So please make your arguments, don’t just state that you have some. It’s fine to pick just one, and then come back for round two after the first one is talked out.
3) When making ethical arguments, it’s always helpful to make clear that you’re aware of likely counterarguments and have dismissed them for thoughtful reasons. It signals that the discussion you’re initiating is more likely to have some nice chewy meat between the slices of bread.
4) In light of #2 and #3 above, asking “please think about this” comes across as patronizing. Do your interlocutor the courtesy of assuming they have thought about this, please.
5) Always think twice before making demands of publishers or artists. Criticize until you run out of breath, but please don’t come into my space and demand (“Keep it in your private stash”) that I not publish an image. Nobody spends twenty years publishing controversial imagery without developing a hair-trigger response to censorious commands, and that response, at least in first draft, is typically short, rude, and monosyllabic.
Thanks!
Those are all vaguely unsettling. Undead vibes everywhere.
Zombie Sophia Loren! I would watch that movie, hell yes I would.
More seriously, LM, the uncanny valley bothers some of us more than others. I honestly think the intensity of our response to degrees of deviation from human “normal” is something that varies a lot from person to person. Perhaps it even has a genetic component, although more likely it’s cultural, like most diverse human traits.
Hi Bacchus,
Following on from your comment above, I’d be really interested in hearing your take on the ethics of these photos.
I have a similar first reaction to Hug; it strikes me as potentially a problem to create and publish photos of someone who, while they did consent to the publication of some photos, didn’t consent to those photos in particular.
But this is new territory, and those are my first thoughts not my final ones, so I’d love to hear your take.
On the topic above – I don’t see this as “faking porn”. I see this as an AI-supported artistic depiction. I don’t think anybody would see this as a deepfake or would be fooled into thinking this was an actual photo, even if the images take a life of their own on the internet. I don’t think there are severe ethical issues about creating erotic art based on actual topless images of a real (living or otherwise) public person.
Thanks, André. I agree with you that these are not realistic depictions that anybody is likely to confuse for a genuine photo. They aren’t going to fool anybody into thinking the actual Sophia Loren actually posed for them. And while there certainly are some ethical issues (of uncertain severity) in connection with making CG erotica containing recognizable human likenesses, I don’t believe in ethical rules that aren’t focused on preventing harm, and I cannot imagine that Sophia Loren will be harmed by these images in specific.
Etia, thanks for your kind and gentle query. The ethics of this stuff are a huge ball of worms, honestly, and my own thinking is far from complete on the topic. I could maybe write a ten thousand word treatise on the moral philosophy of erotic likenesses, but I’m not sure when I’ll have time or inspiration to write all that, or whether even one person would read it. But I will share a few of the notions that inform my thoughts:
1) One worm: I’m unconvinced that thinking about this kind of artwork as “photos” is helpful. As André said, these images are a kind of artwork. Technically, they are a kind of collage; a mathematical jumble, as if somebody shredded all the pages every book and magazine ever published and then used a computer help to piece together the shreds to make a new image at the request of the artist.
2) Another worm: Most people who react negatively to composed imagery containing recognizable human likenesses talk about the consent of the person whose likeness is used. But what is the underlying right? An image of me is stored (crudely speaking) in the brain of every person who recognizes me when they see me. Do they need my consent to look at me? To remember my face? To imagine my face on a naked body they’ve never seen? To photograph my face and print that photo? To paint a picture of me? To paint a picture of me that’s unflattering? To paint a picture of me that’s embarrassing? To paint a picture of me doing something embarrassing that I never actually did? To paint a similar picture, only I actually did do the thing? Or maybe I didn’t do that thing, but I posed for photos of me doing similar things, would that make it different? Does it matter whether they are a good super-realistic painter, or just a scribbler with two wax crayons, or if they just say “Hey Siri, compose an image for me using the photos in your database for reference”? Does it matter if I was in public the first time they saw me? Does it matter that I posed for a picture, or that it was snapped against my will in a place that I thought was private? This is all a spectrum, and we all have moral intuitions about what is the correct place to be along the line between “I don’t own my likeness or have any control over how it is used” and “nobody should view, capture, or reproduce my likeness in any fashion without my consent.” But none of our moral intuitions match — we’re all at different places along that line.
3) Another worm: celebrity. Faked celebrity photos (and unflattering drawings of celebrities, such as kings and popes, doing things that kings and popes ought not to be seen to do) are centuries, perhaps millennia, old. Is it fair for someone to revel in the public gaze when it brings them fame, power, or wealth, while simultaneously claiming “I own my likeness and you may not use it for anything without my consent?” Pretty obviously not, I should think. We are back to spectrums: the extreme claim would be that I shouldn’t draw a crayon drawing of this actress, the minimalist claim would be that I shouldn’t create images that are too believable showing her doing something too private. But even the minimalists don’t agree how believable is too believable or how private is too private. Do you see just how hairy all these issues are? This is a job for philosophers!
I don’t even know where I am myself on all these lines that we draw between unsustainable extreme endpoints. But in this tiny way, I am an artist; and it is the job of artists, sometimes, to provoke unease by walking up and down these lines and making people feel things when we do it. It starts the discussion that the philosophers will spend 100 years wrapping up in dense treatises of scholarship and law. That’s why art, and artists, are so often controversial.
I can’t think at that level of detail about every image I decide to create or to publish. So instead, I think about the harms. If I publish it, who will it hurt, and how much?
Sophia Loren is an international goddess of the silver screen. During her long life she has enjoyed a spectacular career, substantial wealth, enormous fame and fortune. In her youth, she posed topless for photos and at least one movie, something she may (or may not) have later regretted. For my stupid little computer graphics creations to harm her in any way, they would have to either negatively affect her reputation somehow, or they would have to hurt her feelings in some way. I believe it’s vanishingly unlikely that this ninety year old woman is sitting in one of her homes in Geneva, Naples, and Rome, doing internet ego searches so specific that she ever encounters my tiny corner of the internet. And it’s very hard to imagine that anything she saw would so much as crack the calm expression on her face while she dunks her biscotti; it certainly isn’t going to affect her fame, reputation, or wealth in any appreciable way. It’s a gnat, pissing on an elephant. So the answer in this case is “it’s vanishingly unlikely that my little art experiment is going to hurt Sophia Loren.”
Hope all this rambling gives you some idea where my ethical thinking is. Like I told Hug, I’m happy to talk about it. But I can’t have that conversation (or rather, it’s pretty pointless) with people for whom one or more of the fascinating ethical questions is already resolved in their brains as a moral axiom, especially if they seem to assume people should be in broad agreement with them about whatever dogmatic conclusion they’ve reached.
Thanks! That’s a really useful and thoughtful response.
I think the painting analogy in particular is very useful. Interestingly for me though it doesn’t change my initial take; I’d feel similarly uncomfortable about a painting of a naked celebrity that was created without their consent. I also feel uncomfortable about the use of a person’s appearance without consent even if they’re not naked – Christopher Reeve’s posthumous appearance in The Flash for example.
Also there might be another issue which has been highlighted by the sag-aftra strike, which is that if a person’s image is to be used, shouldn’t they be paid for it? That seems to apply doubly if they are someone (like a celebrity, or even a porn performer) who earns their living from their image. A big bone of contention in the strike appears to be the derisory amounts being offered to actors so that models based on scans of them can be used in perpetuity.
I do agree that Sophia Loren almost certainly won’t be hurt (emotionally or otherwise) by these pictures. That just doesn’t stop me worrying that someone else will be hurt by similar images.
There’s clearly a lot of gray arrear here, though. So all that’s still just how I feel rather than what I know.
Discomfort in thought experiments is useful. Usually the sensation of “my simple moral rule tells me this should be fine, but it doesn’t feel fine” is a warning that the simple moral rule has just run over a bump and detected a complication or complexity.
There are a lot of people who feel pretty strongly that we own our images and should be able to control how they are used pretty absolutely. That leads to discomfort over a painting of a naked celebrity or putting a dead person’s image in a movie — even though dead people typically can’t own things. But it’s hard to explain why such absolute ownership doesn’t extend to preventing your photo from appearing in the newspaper, or preventing a political cartoonist from lampooning you, and we have good reasons why those things are allowed. So, once again, we’ve got this rule, and we’ve got different activities that seem to violate the rule, some of which we aren’t comfortable allowing and some of which we are. Discomfort alone doesn’t tell us much, but at least it tells us we need to ask “Is this a bad rule, or is it a good rule with necessary exceptions?”
A lot of gray areas indeed!
Wow… I should perhaps stay out of this one, due to some grayness in the comments and discussions that would make my brain hurt with any self deliberation, but I will make a few free-association comments.
Firstly, my gut-check tells me Bacchus has done nothing wrong in posting his creations. I knew IMMEDIATELY that they were faked. I saw them as caricatures. Probably due to the “hyperrealistic” prompt that was used in their creation. He a TOLD us they were “fake”.
Caracatures are long traditionally protectected and are the basis of most political cartoons. The fact that she is a celebrity also traditionally leaves her especially ripe for such treatment in a legal sense, and by using the term “treatment”, I don’t mean to imply any malicious intent on Bacchus’ part, because I don’t see it. I don’t even get a particularly mischievous vibe, like that which I might infer about the creators of that enjoyable balloon float of a certain ex-President naked and sporting a small penis.
For all we know Ms. Loren might find it flattering to be still an object of our fascination and fantasy. My respect for Ms. Loren and her body of work, hasn’t been diminished in MY mind by these creations. If nothing else, Hollywood tells us that there is pretty much no such thing as bad publicity.
I also can’t see where Bacchus has likely diminished her fortune, and has if anything, likely to have actually in a small way perhaps augmented it in an indirect way.
Another point that comes to mind is, what is it saying that there seems to be some assumption in this discussion, that the naked human body is something to be ashamed of.
I can’t see any malicious intent here, and I’m pretty sure Bacchus has indeed historically shown what I would conclude is an admiration for Ms. Loren.
Bacchus gets no whiplashing from me…
Those are interesting points, Bacchus and Dr. Whiplash. Thank you both.
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