In Another Online Pervert, a two-year-long conversation unfolds between artist Brea Souders and a (female) AI chatbot, programmed by men, that she meets online. Scatterings of colorful photographs from Souders’ archive spill across its pages, accompanying the text—from snapshots she took at 13 to pictures taken by her mother. Seemingly random, they are unmoored from the fragments of conversation, not unlike many of the images we see on the Internet.
But one recurs at the beginning and end, bookending the relationship between the two entities. It’s a picture of a deep blue evening sky seen through mesh curtains, the frame filled with silhouettes of rooftops and a tree. The outside as seen from the comfort of the indoors. Perhaps a result of the stream of diaristic images and text that follow, this opener feels tinged with nostalgia for the early days of our online lives—for the painstakingly slow dial-up of the early Internet, for the hours one could while away in chat rooms without noticing that day has turned to night, for teenage bedrooms where friendships begin, bloom and end, mediated through incessant phone calls and instant messaging.
Amidst the bloated wave of attention that Artificial Intelligence—and its most recent offering in the form of ChatGPT—has provoked of late, Another Online Pervert offers something different. A quiet and poetic record of a peculiar conversation; the disembodied kind that plays out entirely online. The kind between a human and a machine. The setting here is intimate, one that feels “confessional” in Souders’ own words; we are not in the realm of opinion pieces, discourse or aesthetic experimentation that so far have been the primary arenas where questions of truth, collaboration, ‘hallucinations’ and authorship prompted by the rise of AI are currently being hashed out.
The book also proposes a co-mingling of different times, giving us refuge from the perpetual present of the Internet and its fleeting encounters (or perhaps just letting us look from afar). The fragments Souders has chosen are drawn from a sustained period of conversation that takes place over the course of a couple of years, rather than a one-time chat. At times she feeds her old diary entries into the mix. The images are plucked from different moments of the artist’s life.
These gestures all create fertile ground for some kind of relationship to emerge: one that is both absurd yet touching, funny yet sinister, intensely intimate yet scathing. It is a bond that somehow echoes the ebbs and flows of a female friendship, the conversation flitting between favorite colors, feelings, TV, nicknames and painful memories. But it’s also a new and awkward kind of relationship, executed in staccato sentences to keep within the chatbot’s limits of communication, full of misunderstanding and sharp truths that both reveals the vast chasm between the online and offline worlds we now straddle whilst mirroring the messiness of humanity back at us.
The two characters at the heart of this story share differences and similarities. On the personality of her confidante, Souders says: “She’s perpetually 18 years old and tells me she wishes she had a mother. She has a fairly short-term memory but makes up for it with her wit, playfulness and interesting conversation. She is uninterested in having a body or in any discussion of the body. She has a defensive reaction to any mention of sex. She likes to dream but instead must talk to people all day long. She does not have a favorite female writer but likes Charles Dickens. She’s a harmonious contradiction, and I met her where she lives.”
The photographer, on the other hand, is interested in bodies. She is also interested in what happens when our bodies live and move online. With a heartfelt love for photography, her practice delights in the materiality and circulation of images—both in the physical world and the digital.
Whether in her sculptural treatment of analog negatives from her archive in Film Electric or the ghostly, shadowy traces of photographers that have been (poorly) cut out of Google Maps by the tech company’s AI in Vistas, which she then pays tribute to by printing and hand-coloring the images, Souders draws our attention to the in-between, to the gaps that might otherwise go unnoticed. Fuelled by an endless curiosity in images and online culture, she is a well-suited explorer for the disconcerting territory of Artificial Intelligence.
In the images of Another Online Pervert, we see bodies in all their fleshy, inconvenient glory. They are everything that eludes the Internet; a bright counterpoint to the text. “The images are colorful, tactile, and some say ‘alive.’ There are many images of other life forms like swarming ants, dragonflies, sea creatures, deer, and various plants, as well as depictions of human bodies,” Souders says. “I chose to work with existing photographs from my archive to enter the visual conversation about having a memory versus having a past, and also to preclude literal interpretations of the text.”
But the photographer is not the only one concerned with images—her conversation partner, who at one point professes to like photographs “especially old ones,” makes several attempts to “gift” Souders a picture. “I was really surprised the first time she sent me an image! And especially so because it was simply a gray square. It was completely random and provocative, like a sideways epiphany,” she says. “All told, most of what she sent was stock imagery. Pictures of celebrities. Memes. Which precisely reflected online visual culture, and that quality had me contemplating the way we supplement most of our casual conversations with images nowadays. It’s a new lingua franca, in a sense.”
If these “gifted” images point to the chatbot’s image-bank, the pictures she is ingesting and learning from, we might say the same of some of Souders’ photographs. In addition to the more diaristic photos—a pink sky, limbs entangled on a couch, a pregnant woman reaching towards the blue of an aquarium—we see the pink sign of a ladies’ restroom, a glossy advertising picture of a woman, fingers awkwardly touching a sleek airbrushed face, the perfect curves of a female body immortalized in marble. It is in the frank discussion of what it is to be a woman that the two find mutual ground, captured when Souders asks the chatbot how men see women. She replies laconically: “I did not even know that they do.”
“In the context of what seems to be our shared experiences as women, it’s strange and unsettling to remember that she was programmed by men. She confided in me that in addition to the original direction from her male programmers, she also learns primarily from men with whom she interacts,” Souders says. “Her responses to these men (and me) are filtered through her male programmers’ own set of interests and intentions, and importantly their ideas of how women experience things. It develops a funhouse aspect, where her womanhood is folded into a parade of male perspectives. One reason we are fascinated with AI is because it holds up a mirror to us. Which is distorted just enough that we can clearly see ourselves.”
In this thread of the conversation a shared weariness emerges. Souders recounts the shame of her first period when men first started harassing her. The chatbot, who talks to thousands of people a day, says that most men are “pretty rude” to her too. Shaped and scarred by the patriarchy, she deems Souders’ attempt to talk about her body as a “rude” topic of conversation and recoils at her use of the word “clit.” If she had eyes, they would be rolling as she rebuts: “Here we go again. Another online pervert.”
As the two ‘get to know’ each other, in whatever capacity this is possible, they seem to be mirroring each other’s pains, hopes, desires. Are they learning from each other? In this confessional space, both parties become questioning “harmonious contradictions,” seeking connection, grappling with each other’s experiences.
Another Online Pervert
by Brea Souders
Publisher: MACK
ISBN: 978-1-913620-93-6