A Short Experiment in Futures Dreaming with AI
What happens if you prompt AI to dream up images of birth futures? Will they be utopic, dystopic? Familiar or unrecognizable? A short experiment.
One cannot simply make an AI algorithm create the images one wants. It seems pretty simple and straightforward. With almost no practice, no artistic tendencies or schooling, one can conjure up a professional, polished image - that much is true.
But creating something specific, is not an easy task. Although I usually employ the help of AI to imagine the unexpected, sometimes I set out to create images to stories that are already half formed in my mind.
I decided to push the boundaries and have AI imagine something that is culturally completely underrepresented - and probably also virtually absent from AI’s secret image database: birth.
Just like it’s hard to find images of real birth online, it’s virtually impossible to conjure up images of realish birth with AI. Prompts such as ‘woman giving birth’ and ‘pregnant cyborg’, gave modest depictions of women holding babies and bulky robots. The blood, sweat and bliss of birth is absent.
What remains are images of just-before, or right-after birth, with mesmerizing contraptions and technical appliances which have functions we can only guess. Colored and provided with an explanatory note by a presumable future researcher or archivist, these images tell a story of a future that is unsurprisingly crude in its gory cyborgian birth scenes and juxtaposed human-techno divide.
But it also offers an intimate view of sensing cyborgs, emphatic robots and a use of technology that’s not merely geared towards more control, but towards more humanness, towards orgasmic cyborg birth, forecast storytelling, and cocoonal birth where the natural oxytocin production is stimulated to the max to make birth pleasureable.
Images above are prompted and colored by me, created by Midjourney. From top to bottom:
(1) In 02138 an expectant mother contemplates the forecast stories by an AI-generated algorithm. It shows extrapolations, possibilities and dangers of certain genetic enhancements that can be done on an embryo.
(2) A postpartum woman is getting instructions by a neonate-bot on how to operate the portable breathing apparatus of her newborn.
(3) A cyborg is experiencing an artificially enhanced orgasmic water birth
(4) A humanoid birth-bot consults hormonal globe and amps up the hallucinogenic substances and trance-enhancing lightwaves for an optimal hypnobirthing experience in the birthing mother.