Artificial intelligence text-to-image generators (eg Dall-E 3, Exactly.ai) work from large datasets of imagery. Currently, as users, we are also acting as play testers.

Ongoing experiments with these systems are looking to use the image generators in ways which challenge the dataset, highlight the biases built-in by the limited datasets and fundamentally explore them as a way to create.

In Mark Fishers wonderful book The Weird and The Eerie, he notes that "There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was". This quote summarises much of the feeling looking at AI self-portraits: when they feel strangely similar to real appearance, dress sense, mannerism or demographic we are confronted with the ways in which we are both similar to everyone else and Other to ourselves.