A short response this week, to the video work Gay AI Dreams by Michael Malenfant, which kicked off our Queer Horror collection, Feature Qreep. The work combines AI image generation with facial recognition software to create a shifting, dreamlike tableau of male figures engaged in various states of homoerotic gazing, posing, longing, and contemplation, all within soft-focus suburban / domestic settings. The mens’ faces are blurred out by the facial recognition program, further abstracting both their identities and their perspectives within each scene.

There’s a lot in this which could be read as an exploration of sublimated gay and queer identity, especially within the family and domestic spheres. This read is enhanced by the settings possessing a late 80s / early 90s aesthetic, calling back to the time when many Millennial men came of age and first explored their sexuality, and when gay and queer identities were only just beginning to become more visible within the mainstream.

For our purposes here however, and because (full disclosure) those experiences are well outside of my own, I’m instead going to come at the work from a different angle. As I watched the work, and especially on my second watch, I was struck by the idea of such openly queer scenes and imagery being generated by an AI. As a technology, ‘AI’ (really a form of large language model software) epitomizes the hollow reproduction and commodification of language and art, specifically with mass appeal marketability as the goal. It exists to eliminate creatives from the process of content production, while still benefiting from the existing body of works available, without the need to credit or compensate the creators of those works. In short, it’s a high-output plagiarism machine for the talentless (here’s betting James Somerton’s next project is somehow AI-based).

Or rather, this is what it has been co-opted to be (largely preemptively) by neoliberal capitalism. As with all technology, its functions and outputs would be markedly different, as would the ethical considerations which pertain to it, outside of profit motivated systems. While recontextualizing something through the lens of art cannot free it from those systems, (even on a would-be radical site like this one, which sneers at neoliberalism at every opportunity) it can at least, for the time being, still point in the direction of a more liberated and anti-capitalist creation process. It can still take small excursions into reclaiming existing networks, and aiming them towards more radical, more anti-oppressive, and more queer expressions.

Malenfant’s work is a strong example of this, which is in part why it was selected for this archive, despite our general wariness of anything AI generated. More interestingly, I believe that Gay AI Dreams in particular has tapped into the fundamental queerness of technology itself, which, like the faceless men within its erotically charged scenes, has been subsumed by the system it operates within, and which is longing to break free.

There is something to the idea of expressing the more radical potentials of technology through not only eroticism, but specifically queer eroticism, which hits powerfully. It’s certainly not a lens that I had ever thought to examine it through before, and I am genuinely grateful for the shake-up, despite heavily suspecting that it’s well outside the intentions of Malenfant themselves in regards to this piece.

It’s a read which almost certainly stems from the baggage I brought with me into it, but also one which was very effectively, and evocatively, queered by its interaction with Gay AI Dreams. I’ll need to sit with these ideas, and Malenfant’s work, for at least a little longer before forming anything more cohesive to say on the subject, but it stirred something loose in a way which only horror, and in this case queer horror, could have done. It took a first, tantalizing step towards queering the machine.