Charlie Engman makes AI images out of internet flotsam

When photographer Charlie Engman was creating his new book of AI-generated images, he was thinking a lot about what makes an image feel cursed. Created predominantly using Midjourney, the book attempts to evoke many of the same feelings as these uncanny, haunted vernacular pictures that have come to define the anti-aesthetic of the internet. Its many different characters are often doing something and nothing at once – a notion of purpose behind their actions but no obvious reasons – placing a dog in the air, for example, or putting a hand in someone’s pocket, or, as is quite frequently the case, prostrating their body in worship or submission. 

“This is maybe silly, but honestly, I’ve always been kind of jealous of ‘cursed images’,” Engman says. “I’ve always had this in the back of my mind that I could never make a picture as good because they’re impossible to make on purpose.” When picking a name, he also liked the occult qualities of the word. “It’s a magical word. This was a bit of a nod to this controlless quality of AI, where you’re conjuring something from the machine. You put in some prompts: the eye of newt, the hair of dog, and then somehow it comes out as whatever, a dragon!”

Engman took a cyclical, “or regurgitative” approach to make the book, feeding it with both text prompts and his own photography. “I will start with an input, I’ll get an output, or I’ll start with a prompt, I’ll get an output. Usually, the output is not great, but then I’ll take the output or elements of the output and I will reintroduce that as an input with additional prompting. Then, I’ll get a new output. It’s probably not that great. Still, I’ll take that one, and I’ll do it again. So it’s kind of like a human centipede.” With no distinction where the input ends and the output begins, no captions, and no particularly familiar characters, we’re left to make up our own minds about the authenticity of these ‘photographs’.

Well, sort of. The wider context, the cacophony of opinions around any AI-generated content, makes it impossible to have a completely unaffected view. To publish something made using Midjourney, DALL-E, or ChatGPT is to enter that work into an arena of discourse about its ethics, whether the maker wants it to arrive there or not. I ask Engman if doing press around Cursed requires him to defend the work as much as promote it. “I think the people who are interested in talking to me about it are more open-minded and curious,” he says. “I’ve also published a lot outside of the book, around my own thoughts and feelings, around what the technology is doing, its social and polemical life outside of [my] work.”

Earlier this year, Engman wrote an opinion piece for Art in America under the headline: “You don’t hate AI, you hate capitalism”. In it, he makes the point that if AI is trained using everything humans have ever made, it should not just be artists and ‘creative work’ who are deemed worthy of intellectual protection. “Everyone contributes labor to society, and it is the collective energy of this labor that constitutes the powerful algorithms and the meaning these algorithms have within the society that created them… it is not only the artists whose work has trained, or ‘inspired,’ the AI models who should be protected and remunerated, but every person alive.”

“I find that [piece] to be a pretty interesting bellwether for people who I’m talking to, if they’ve read it,” Engman tells me. “Obviously, there are people who just can’t get over their inherent mistrust of it from a creative perspective. I tried to address this in the essay itself, but there’s, like, a lot of different lines of attack.”

Trying to define the abstract quality of a cursed image, Tolentino wrote: “They are little snapshots of a world arranged by a spooked, mischievous, possibly malevolent presence.” If we are to agree, then, by Engman’s logic, the malevolent presence arranging what we see in these images must be capitalism. Writing further in his essay: “When we look at the output of AI, we see alternately yassified and mutilated glimpses of ourselves and our communal structures. AI images are funhouse reflections of a sociopolitical reality receding in the rearview mirror. Many people are unsettled by what they see in this warped reflection.”

In 2024, the kind of visual content that accounts like @cursedimages, Reddit forums and Tumblrs identified and curated is ubiquitous. To keep us plugged into our feeds, social media has become louder, stranger, more befuddling – liminal spaces, fucked-up food and awkward Simpsons frames now feel as native to the platforms as cute puppies and babies. With his new book, Engman creates a satisfyingly gross milkshake of all this strangeness, using Midjourney as his blender. But can any work, consciously made and elegantly presented in print, recreate the exact same cursed feelings experienced via our phones, in the dark, our faces illuminated by the harsh light of a screen? For better or worse, no.

Cursed (2024) by Charlie Engman published by SPBH Editions and MACK