Antonella Autuori, Anthony Masure and Saul Pandelakis gathered in Geneva in February and spent a week generating NSFW content to test Image Generation (GenAI) platforms. → Anthony Masure & Antonella Autuori. This workshop is the second in the Fucking Tech! timeline, which began in October 2024. Following the first workshop spent testing AIGFs (AI Girlfriends or virtual girlfriends), the idea here was to understand the possibilities of generative image AI specifically in the field of pornographic content. → CivitAI interface, an online pornographic content generation service. On the left side of the screen, you can see the “queue” that shows current requests and their processing status. We were particularly interested in prompt writing (descriptions received by the model to generate the image) and developed a methodology that is described in the vlog below, as well as in a visual essay also available for consultation at the end of this post. → Antonella Autuori and Saul Pandelakis busy generating! Ultimately, we generated 400 images in the context of this workshop, and the corpus has since been expanded based on fictions written by Ketty Steward and Elise Bonnard, science fiction authors who are partners in the project.

In the fall of 2024, the Fucking Tech! project began and presented its foundations during the research project showcase day on Thursday, November 14, 2024 at the Centre Maurice Chalumeau. The conference started by recalling the project’s origins: research initiated in 2016 on sexbots by Saul Pandelakis and Anthony Masure. After presenting our work at the Contemporary Forms of Computer Imagination conference (University of Montpellier 3) and publishing it in the journal Res Futurae (“Desiring Machines: from sexbots to loving OS”, 2017). We then showed how much the “sex tech” landscape had changed between the research’s beginnings and the 2024 launch of Fucking Tech!. The proliferation of dolls, unclear product landscape, fallacious promises, objects with pedopornographic characteristics… were all discussed during the presentation. We then presented our objectives and deliverables: in year 1, a chatbot that generates erotic stories, StoryTellurX; in year 3, a collective book entitled Terra Incognita Sexualis mapping the possibilities of technologies for sex (sexbots, dolls, specialized AI…) The presentation concluded with an overview of upcoming work stages, including a workshop in January on virtual girlfriends and another in March on generating pornographic images with AI dedicated to this function. Here is how we envisioned our progress in year one: