Why Arvida Byström is selling uncanny AI-generated nudes

Arvida Byström is selling nudes online. The Swedish artist first came across a website claiming “it can undress anyone” using AI around four months ago, and figured, “people will make money out of nonconsensual AI nudes, so what if I make money out of my own consensual nudes?” Generating AI replicas of herself and selling them on Sunroom, an Only Fans-adjacent platform, for $10k each, she collaborated with Iris.AI to create a chatbot, which she dubbed Arvida.AI, allowing users to interact with an artificial version of herself, trained on interviews from around the internet. “Some people really like the interactions they’ve had with her, like dating ‘me’ on the platform,” she confides, “so people have really caught feelings for her.”

For the past decade, Byström has made a name for herself for her artfully curated self-portraits that explore what it means to be a girl online through the lens of social media and emerging tech. Whether she’s writing while dressing cherries in lace panties or conversing with her AI sex doll replica, Harmony, the multidisciplinary artist is a prolific online presence, whose pastel-hued aesthetics began making waves in the Tumblr era before spawning across the net in the form of ultra-femme, and occasionally grotesque, visuals. “For me, what’s been interesting is that the people engaging on the platform already have a parasocial relationship with me, so they’re interacting with a manufactured side of me,” she says. “Selling nudes that are generated with AI is still staged, so this interaction is as genuine as any parasocial interaction.”

In The Clouds (published by Nuda) is a pocket-sized book featuring over 200 images from the project, as well as essays from the likes of Slavoj Žižek, C/M Edenborg and Olivia Kan-Sperling. Originally sold under the pretence that they were real, the nudes on show come in many different forms, some rendering the Byström’s body to porn-perfect standards (“it has consistently made my boobs bigger), while others take a weirder turn, challenging the idea of what’s hot with creaturesque forms featuring mono-boobs and garbled proportions. “The strange ones I relate to as myself more,” she affirms.

“I truly hope some people will jerk off to [the book], especially to the really weird photos” – Arvida Byström

This is particularly interesting when you look at how AI depicts the female form, and its tendency to mirror society’s beauty standards, while also generating images that are particularly X-rated. “It’s clearly trained on pornographic images because the ones where it looks like I’m being fucked by a dildo it’s just me holding like a dildo in front of my underwear or whatever I’m wearing,” she shares. Even the images that appear explicitly machine-generated are still desirable, albeit in an uncanny way. “I truly hope some people will jerk off to [the book], especially to the really weird photos.”

With AI, the line between what’s real and artificial is already becoming increasingly blurred, mutating the ways we see ourselves and others. “The sad part about it is how they’re making beauty standards more complex,” Byström muses. This can admittedly move in a number of ways, either accelerating existing beauty norms (as per the rise of AI influencers), or creating artificial desires so extreme that they can only exist inside our screens. “Maybe when you meet a human you want something that’s actually more human. Or maybe we get so oversaturated with this normative beauty that it’s no longer interesting to us anymore.”

In The Clouds [published by Nuda] is available to order here now.