Reaching out to people in the sex work industry to ask them about the impact of AI in their field:
Questions:
- What is intimacy?
- What are the sociological and psychological aspects of it?
- What is digital intimacy?
- What is sexual autonomy?
- How did feminist movements create sexual autonomy for women?
- …
Intimacy is not a fixed state, but a process of negotiation. It arises through relationship, communication, and consent. Feminist and queer productions portray intimacy as something real, contradictory, sometimes imperfect — and that is their strength. Especially in times of AI, intimacy is being renegotiated — also between humans and technology.
– Jasmin Hagendorfer
Second Session with Soph
- choosing Intimacy as our broad topic (keeping the porn industry aspect in the background)
Saeed’s workshop
Workshop product itself: Satirical aspect
- We didn’t like that our video “made fun” of people that want to experience sexuality in ways common people are not used to
=> Led our community towards activism
In the ‘solved world’, the image of women, their bodies and sex is twisted and warped into unrealistic standards
- our community would fight against that
for us: difficult to imagine how that could look like, still explicit because of the porn aspect
Matthew’s workshop
(see other post)
We moved away from sex and toward intimacy through gestures (specifically hands and touch), including intimacy outside of romantic relationships, for example: friendships, family, intimacy in comforting and listening, etc. Also intimacy in encounters with strangers, and so on.
Creating a story
- instead of creating a community around intimacy => focus on creating intimacy (and maybe community) throughout the story
- focus on one or fewer characters = more personal
- What’s the situation and environment for our character?
We decided that in our film, we want to represent intimacy through storytelling rather than focusing directly on a community.
We want to show one or two people in our documentary who, in some way, are involved with AI companions (owning AI companions, “programming” or finalizing AI companions for others = character trainers) and portray their intimacy as well as the related problems, questions, lifestyles, and so on.
We moved away from the porn industry, but we’re not completely ruling out that it might still have an influence on our subjects or on the AI companions.
- How does intimacy appear for our character?
- What is the message we want to convey with our movie?
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