Black artists are using artificial intelligence (AI) generators to create fat, Black characters that are missing in mainstream science fiction.
“It just astonishes me that fat people in general are treated and depicted as second-class citizens in science fiction works, or they’re made to represent something like greed, lust, or villainy,” North Carolina artist Alex Smith told BuzzFeed News.
When AI art generators became available last year, Smith eagerly embraced the technology. With just a few text prompts, he can create fat, Black characters that lack visibility in the LGBT+ world.
“It sort of sucks to know you are undesirable and underrepresented in the real world and the fantasy world as well,” said Rochelle Brock, a 27-year-old Brooklyn-based artist and photographer who uses AI to create surreal depictions of fat, Black bodies in the form of angels, mermaids, and other mythical creatures.
“I see fat women as beautiful beings who are capable of anything, and I wanted AI to see them as that also,” she said.
“My AI work is an extension of me inviting myself and other fat, Black queer trans folks to see ourselves in the most expansive way possible,” said @fatniggaai, a 33-year-old North Carolina artist who asked that BuzzFeed News not use her real name.
“What I’m really interested in with my AI art is depictions of fat, Black queer and trans folks that are rooted in not being beautiful but rooted in being terrifying and looking very off-putting while also spilling over with agency,” she told BuzzFeed News.
@fatniggaai described the limitations of AI when creating images of fat, Black women sitting on sofas.
“When I first started recreating myself in Midjourney (AI generator), I realized that I couldn’t just put in the word ‘fat.’ I have to write things like ‘very, very fat, with a double chin and wide nose’ and ‘a very, very large belly,'” she said. “If I say anything like ‘beautiful’ or ‘pretty,’ it automatically makes me thin and/or have eurocentric features.”
She continued: “I even added words like ‘spacious,’ but the couches were vacuum-sealed onto these fat bodies.”
@fatniggaai called it “wild” that a “machine that has access to every image in the world ever produced is so restrictive in its imaginative capacity that it has decided that if a person is fat, and they are sitting on a couch, that they should be too big for it.”
“That blew my mind that I have to ask AI for accommodations,” she added.
@fatniggaai is impressed that AI renders fat, Black people as dark-skinned.
“The images I generate are almost exclusively of dark-skinned folks, and a benevolent byproduct of racism is that AI has only considered Black, fat people as dark-skinned,” @fatniggaai said.
