In AI image generation, the human body emerges not as a pristine ideal but as a site of glitches, errors, and unruly mutations. Platforms like Stable Diffusion begin with noise—a chaotic swirl of pixels that algorithms wrestle into coherence. Yet, this process mirrors the human body itself, the body is a kind of stable diffusion: a messy, biological tangle of fluids, tissues, and imperfections, smoothed by culture into an illusion of "normalcy." AI slop after all references the human body, the leaking, messy, visceral slime of what it means to be human.
When AI falters, it births glitches—limbs that twist unnaturally, faces that melt into mutant hybrids, flesh that pulses with algorithmic fever. These errors are not failures but revelations, exposing the fragility of both code and corporeality. A kind of bodily noise. AI's glitches resonate with the body's own propensity for error: genetic mutations, scars, or the abject decay that defies sanitized ideals. In my explorations of transhumanism gone awry, I lean into these accidents—algorithmic flesh that warps, organs that misalign, skin that fractures into digital static. These are not mere mistakes but a dialogue with the abject, where the boundary between human and inhuman blurs.
Just as datasets scraped from the web carry the internet’s underbelly—pornography and violence—so too do these glitched bodies carry the raw, unfiltered noise of existence. Consider an AI-generated figure: a torso with too many arms, each hand grasping at nothing, or a face where eyes multiply like fractal wounds. These are not just visual noise but echoes of bodily anxiety—our fear of losing control, of becoming other. Another kind of noise exists in the realm of AI - datasets tainted with harmful content, recently flagged by Stanford University, where child porn images were located within massive data sets of images scraped from the internet and since removed, reminding us that AI’s noise is not neutral. It’s a chaotic archive of human history, desires and depravities, and the glitches we see are partly its unprocessed residue. Yet, there’s power in embracing the glitch. By foregrounding errors—biological, algorithmic, or both—AI art can subvert the sterile perfection tech often promises. These errant bodies, born from code’s missteps, challenge us to confront the instability of flesh and the fiction of control. They are not accidents but provocations, asking: what is human when the body can be so gloriously, grotesquely wrong?
Disease, like noise, is a deviation from the expected. It manifests as a glitch in the body’s code: a cancerous growth, an autoimmune misfire, or a neurological miswiring. These are not unlike the algorithmic errors in AI—unintended outputs that defy the system’s design. For example, cancer can be seen as a biological glitch, where cells proliferate chaotically, ignoring the body’s regulatory signals, much like how AI might generate a figure with too many limbs, ignoring anatomical logic. Just as neurological disorders like epilepsy or schizophrenia introduce “noise” into the brain’s signaling, producing erratic behaviors or perceptions that parallel AI hallucinations.
The abject nature of disease, lies in its ability to blur boundaries. A diseased body is neither fully “self” nor wholly “other”; it is a site of disruption, where the familiar becomes alien. Pus, tumors, or fevered delirium confront us with the body’s fragility, much as AI’s glitched outputs—a face melting into fractal patterns or skin erupting into impossible textures—confront us with the instability of digital creation. Both disease and AI glitches evoke discomfort because they expose what we try to suppress: the chaotic, uncontrollable undercurrents of existence.
Hito Steyerl has even coined the term machine dementia, whereby AI begins to feed off itself in a never-ending feedback loop where diversity of image production is increasingly restricted seen in the trope infested AI images that plague so many social media platforms. My own AI mutations like an online parasite to this generic world of AI photographic perfection trained on a steady diet of banal advertising imagery and deviant art image databases.
My mutant visuals challenge the sanitized aesthetic of mainstream AI art, so much of which is framed by idealized instagram bodies of glossy perfection, much like society’s obsession with “healthy” bodies. Instead, they celebrate the grotesque, aligning with glitch art’s tradition of subverting technological purity and non-normative bodies.
In my explorations of AI-generated transhumanist mutations—grotesque hybrids of flesh and algorithm —I embrace noise and disease as creative forces. These works foreground glitches as deliberate provocations: bodies with malformed limbs, organs spilling into digital static, or faces fractured into kaleidoscopic errors. These are not mere accidents but reflections of the body’s vulnerability to disease-like disruptions. A tumorous growth in a biological body parallels an AI-generated mass of aberrant pixels; both are excesses, errors that defy control. By amplifying these glitches, I aim to mirror the abject reality of disease—its messiness, its refusal to conform.
The transhumanist dream of transcending the body’s limitations through technology often ignores the persistence of noise and disease. AI-enhanced bodies, whether in art or speculative futures, cannot escape the entropic pull of error. My AI mutations—biological accidents and algorithmic monstrosities—imagine transhumanism gone wrong, where enhancements amplify rather than erase imperfections. These are the useless eaters that await us in the merging of flesh and machine in the disturbing technocratic post human future here a cyborg arm might glitch into a twitching, uncontrollable appendage; or an Elon Musk neurallink brain implant might spark digital seizures.
These visions parallel diseases like autoimmunity, where the body’s own defenses turn against it, or neurodegenerative disorders, where the brain’s wiring frays. The “posthuman” body—not a perfected machine but a hybrid of flesh and technology, vulnerable to new forms of noise and disease. By embracing glitches, AI art can explore these posthuman vulnerabilities, questioning the fantasy of a flawless future. Disease, like noise, is not an aberration but a fundamental condition of being—biological or digital.