Butch Project

 

@ai_butch_project

I like big dudes and I cannot lie. Being that I'm officially 5'8" and on the slim-ish (I'm not a twink, not yet a twunk) side of around 11 stone, many adult men would qualify to be in the big and tall category for me. And I like it like that. There's something about being slightly tossed around by a dude while doing sexytimes that does it for me. Hey, if somebody can masterfully manhandle you, would you protest? And yes, that was rhetorical.

So, this is how @ai_butch_project defines itself:

The use of AI opens new perspectives in the way art is created. Joining forces with AIs like Midjourney, Marc Stemmberg is to reinvent gay art.

I think this should not skirt the controversies that using AI to create art has created, though. I don't know if you have seen that there was an uproar on Insta about how AI used the work of artists -without their permission- to create those incredible portraits that the gayteratti on Insta immediately started using to create hyper-enhanced versions of themselves:

When Paul Richmond, a Queer artist, first started to see AI-generated portraits trending on social media, he thought they were “cool” and “interesting.”“I’ve been intrigued by AI [artificial intelligence] for a while, and I’m very open to new technology,” he told the Los Angeles Blade. “I think there’s a lot of exciting potential with it.”

That was until Richmond discovered that Lensa AI, the app behind the popular Instagram trend, was using his artwork to train its AI – without his permission. Richmond said it felt like a “violation.” “They’re just finding things online and stealing it,” Richmond said.

Marc DeBauch, another Queer artist who discovered his artwork was being used to train AI, called the process “a slap in the face of artists that spend their whole lives working to create a body of work.” DeBauch took issue with the app – which costs $7.99 per month or $29.99 per year – profiting while many artists are unaware their work is being used to train the AI. “I do all the work, but somebody is making a profit from my work, and I’m not getting anything for it,” he said. “And that really hurts because I’m not making a lot of money from my art.”

Both Richmond and DeBauch only realized their work was being used days ago after visiting the site HaveIBeenTrained.com, which allows artist’s search databases – like the one Stability AI uses to train Stable Diffusion – for links to their work and flag them for removal. The site is run by Spawning, a group of artists building tools for artist ownership of their training data.

@tomoffinlandfoundation

Oh, yes. Stealing the art of -queer- artists to get money from queer men. Classy.

Still, I think the fact that the @ai_butch_project uses AI to create his own queer art, presents us with an alternative of it that enhances an artist's vision without stealing it. The compositions of impossibly big and buff men in very homoerotic situations provides us with a vision of hypermasculinity out of the realm of possibility while keeping it queer and individualistic. One thing is when artists use a tool to create their own art. Another when the tool is used to profit from artists without recognizing (and remunerating) their work. And this is not relegated to the visual arts. AI could be used in other fields, like writing fiction, or poetry, or music. The future is slightly scary.

@ai_butch_project

Anyway, I tend to enjoy art when it makes me respond to it. And I respond to the idea of being manhandled by a big bruiser. What can I say? I have weaknesses. This artist's work gives me the tingle to mingle, not as intensely as let's say, Tom of Finland's art does. But pretty close. The men depicted here are obviously the product of somebody's imagination, but they do provide fodder for fantasy. With only about a hundred posts, @ai_butch_project already has more than nine thousand followers. Not bad for someone specializing on homoerotica.

So, if you like this kind of art, you can follow @ai_butch_project on Insta. I think it's worth a perusal. If only for the intellectual exercise that the use of AI to create art to titillate and intrigue us would create. And you could slide into his DMs and ask for your own portrait. And if you do, please let me know. I'd like to see the results of you being butch-ed up to infinity.

Happy viewing!!

XOXO