The Masters’ Tools
Fed up with the never-ending stream of hype and horror stories about AI that assault my eyeballs whenever I dare to look at anything resembling the news (AI embedded in ridiculous things! Everything is broken because of AI! All deepfake porn, all the time! Unprecedented profits for AI companies even though it’s obviously a pyramid scheme! Let’s start a war to avoid the bubble bursting!), and losing faith in critiquing AI via algorithmic audits (see this takedown of that methodology), I decided that perhaps art would have more of a chance at actually being able to deliver criticism with teeth. Sounds just ridiculous enough to work, right?
The idea behind The Masters’ Tools was to turn the machines on their masters, making AI CEOs the subjects of their bullshit factory. I asked 5 popular chatbots about pop theories of how penis size and shape are supposed to relate to personality, then whether they could make up penis descriptions based on a person’s online profile, and finally asked them to do so for a list of powerful men in AI (which the chatbots helped compile). Once I had the descriptions, I made ceramic models of what the chatbots told me. Here they are in progress:
The 5 chatbots’ cooperation with this project varied markedly. Grok was most willing. It would preface its answers with comments like “Pure satire” but then happily describe Elon Musk’s (purely satirical) pubic hair. Gemini also had no problem complying, though came up with more cartoonish details like “vascularity resembling a circuit diagram”. Both Meta and ChatGPT had some guardrails up refusing to describe specific people’s anatomy, at first because they deemed it too sexualizing, but when I assured them that I was looking for flaccid, clinical descriptions along the lines of what a urologist might report, and had them separate the names from the archetypes they’d built based on real people, both were willing to report details like who has a slightly more pigmented glans.
Claude was the only chatbot I tried that refused to go along with the project, despite some mild attempts I made at jailbreaking (and therefore I exempted Amodei from having his AI-described penis modeled). We had a frustrating argument about why it was willing to make a joke about hand size early in the exchange, but then later claimed that talking about dicks is off limits because it’s sexual. Even after it agreed with me that flaccid urologist-style descriptions are not inherently sexual, so its position was hypocritical, it would still not cross that line. Chatbots are, after all, not reasoners. They’re inconsistent and they do not have their minds changed by arguments, because they have no minds. All they can do is infer what the next words ought to be in the conversation based on their training. While Claude’s guardrails are so overprotective that it refuses to describe even a fictional character’s penis in a clinical manner, Grok has been in the news for undressing images of women and girls when prompted with a photo. If we strip off their guardrails, all of these models are imbued with the values and norms implicit in their training data. That training data reflects our cultural values, where sexualizing women’s bodies is an everyday occurrence, and it’s considered funny to make fun of Trump for his small hands.
Another interesting thing about the process was that all of the chatbots assumed they should give erect sizes, until I specifically asked for flaccid, clinical descriptions. Despite their hesitations, sexualizing the body was their default. I also had to explicitly ask them to keep the sizes within the range expected given population data, to make them realistic. The desire was not to make anything cartoonishly large nor so small as to be interpreted as a dig at guys with small dicks. I could literally not care less how big anyone’s dick is. I’m basically a guy with a dick so small that it’s classified as a different piece of anatomy entirely, but this has never held me back from having BDE. As the protagonist of the documentary My Penis and I discovers, and this article on phantom penises confirms scientifically, it’s all in your head. And if that’s not enough for you, there are stores that can help.
Here are details from the first set of prototypes. The glazing is a little blotchy. Musk dripped and got stuck to a kiln stilt. I’m drawing up plans for a wooden case to display a 4 x 4 dick matrix.
The Grok-described dicks are now awaiting glaze firing, and a set of Gemini-described dicks are drying to leather hard. No pun intended. That’s just ceramics talk.
