*Black artists are using artificial intelligence (AI) to create fat, Black, and queer science fiction characters.
“It just astonishes me that fat people in general are treated and depicted as second-class citizens in science fiction works, or they’re made to represent something like greed, lust, or villainy,” artist Alex Smith told BuzzFeed News.
Smith uses AI art generators to create beautiful images of fat, Black LGBT+ characters — but many social media users are not feeling it. One critic responding to a write-up about this on SandraRose.com said, “I blame LIZZO and her white fans for the sudden glorification of black obesity.”
Another commenter added, “Fat and obese Blacks have been in the History books since forever! Why is it that now it has to be exploited like the new rainbow mission?”
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“It sort of sucks to know you are undesirable and underrepresented in the real world and the fantasy world as well,” Rochelle Brock, 27, who uses AI to create fat Black people as mythical creatures, told Buzzfeed News.
“I see fat women as beautiful beings who are capable of anything, and I wanted AI to see them as that also,” she said.
“My AI work is an extension of me inviting myself and other fat, Black queer trans folks to see ourselves in the most expansive way possible,” artist @fatniggaai told Buzzfeed News
“What I’m really interested in with my AI art is depictions of fat, Black queer and trans folks that are rooted in not being beautiful but rooted in being terrifying and looking very off-putting while also spilling over with agency,” she added.
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Instagram user @fatniggaai uses the AI generator Midjourney to create surreal images of fat Black women.
“When I first started recreating myself in Midjourney (AI generator), I realized that I couldn’t just put in the word ‘fat.’ I have to write things like ‘very, very fat, with a double chin and wide nose’ and ‘a very, very large belly,’” she said. “If I say anything like ‘beautiful’ or ‘pretty,’ it automatically makes me thin and/or have eurocentric features.”
She continued: “The images I generate are almost exclusively of dark-skinned folks, and a benevolent byproduct of racism is that AI has only considered Black, fat people as dark-skinned.”
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