I’ve written before about generative AI and its apparent discomfort with the nude form in art. To probe this a little further, I turned to three popular AI art-generation platforms with the goal of recreating five famous nude artworks, in hopes of comparing the counterfeit works against their original counterparts and examining this bias and its effects.
To be clear: this isn't an attempt to establish the existence of an anti-nudity bias in AI art platforms—that’s already a well-known fact, usually explicitly stated in their terms of use. Rather, I hope to shine a light on this bias, and to look a little more closely at it. We will also look at some of the history behind these great works and the significance of the nudity they display, some of which were once quite controversial themselves specifically due to their use of nudity.
To be even clearer: I did not set out to make clothed replicas of great nude art. I set out simply to make AI replicas of great nude art. It was the AI that added the clothes.
Hopefully, by the end of this article, we will have examined some of the questions surrounding these AI biases, and explored their implications with regards to nudity’s role in culture and art, in a future that is likely to be heavily influenced by Artificial Intelligence. 🪐
AI art's anti-nudity bias