Unprompted

Unprompted is a series of portraits made by combining photography and AI. 650 self-portraits of each subject were input into an AI program and the program was tasked with drawing a new photograph of the subject. Some of the resulting images looked like the person, but most had strange and grotesque deformations. Nine AI images of each subject were selected for the final composite portrait. These portraits are a literal illustration of AI’s capacity to distort information. These deformations are unprompted.

Please note: This series does not use any off-the-shelf programs like DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion. No work by any other artist was used in the making of this series, and Unprompted demonstrates an ethical use of AI.

Does AI truly understand what a person looks like? And what does AI add to a photographic portrait of an individual? Unprompted navigates the void between what humans understand and what AI generates.