"I Just Don't Want My Work Being Fed Into The AI Blender": Queer Artists on Refusing and Resisting Generative AI
For CSCW researchers and queer communities, this paper highlights the need to support queer world-building by refusing dominant AI imaginaries.
This paper explores how queer artists perceive and resist generative AI's encroachment into their art worlds, finding significant tensions between the relationality of queer art practices and the anti-relationality of GenAI. Through 15 interviews, participants largely refused GenAI use, seeing limited potential only in surreal image models.
Art-making is a collective social activity through which queer people engage in political resistance, develop identities, archive queer memory, and form community. However, in recent years, generative AI has disrupted queer artistic communities. Through 15 semi-structured interviews, we examine how queer artists are making sense of the encroachment of GenAI into their art worlds. Our findings surface significant tensions between the relationality of our participants' queer art practices and the perceived anti-relationality of GenAI development and use. We detail how our participants refuse and resist GenAI use and development in response and highlight the limited role our participants saw for GenAI within art-making, such as the queer aesthetic potential of surreal image models. Drawing on queer theory, we discuss how CSCW researchers might support queer artists by refusing dominant AI imaginaries and supporting queer world-building.