“The use of generative AI tools to portray humans has posed persistent problems. … It turns out that a machine learning model needs to be trained on nudes – just like any human, by the way – to understand how human bodies usually hold together. …

If one extends the promt to the title of Édouard Manet’s famous painting The Luncheon on the Grass … [the] samples show a healthy dose of gay porn influence, paired with a wide-ranging inability (or unwillingness) to deal with boobs, hands or feet, or any other kind of joint. …

These monsters are not issued from malfunction of technology – those times are past – but from the pictorial rules and legal and moral norms imposed by/on digital industries. These rules are at once prude and sensationalist …

There is, however, another way to interpret the missing limbs … Maybe these renderings portray peopole affected by thalidomide poisoning. … Thalidomide is a substance marketed in the 1950s by the West German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal. Sold (in Germany) under the name Contergan … it caused 10,000 babies … [being] born … with all kinds of congenutal health issues. Many died. …

Chemie Grünenthal … hired a substantial number of former Nazi scientists with an astonishing combined criminal record … Many of these people responsible … got away with mass ‘murder’ not just once, but twice. Profits were privatised, and risks collectivised. …

The missing limbs in the SD3 renderings … indicate that any mitigation efforts to prevent future health and social hazards created by profit maximisation within IA industries are currently woefully inadequate, if not missing altogether.”

aus: Hito Steyerl: Knuckleporn of Phocomelia: GenAI’s Dialectics of Enlightement. In: dies.: Medium Hot, images in the age of heat, London/New York: Verso 2026, S.55-70.

Abb.: A rendering by Stable Diffusion 3, in the style of Édouard Manet, dito.

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