According to Stanford, a piece of content is considered pornographic if its creator intends to stimulate sexual desires or fantasies. But when an image is generated by an AI like Midjourney, that intention becomes less clear: there’s no human author aiming to provoke arousal, yet the system can still produce images that fall within the erotic or pornographic realm.

This series explores the boundary between erotic and pornographic content and the idea of a possible “balance” between the two. Midjourney generates images from text prompts on Discord, but the data it was trained on contains biases, so the results can reflect racist or sexist stereotypes. Even with filters and rules for minors, the AI can recognize and produce explicit content, highlighting how subtle and complex the line between erotic and pornographic can be in the context of AI-generated imagery.