A-Iconoclast: “AIs just want one thing — and it’s fucking beautiful.” (English Edition)

“There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” the congresswoman tells me. It’s a few days after she saw the disturbing deepfake, and we’re waiting for our food in a corner booth of a retro-style diner in Queens, New York, near her neighborhood. She’s friendly and animated throughout our conversation, maintaining eye contact and passionately responding to my questions. When she tells me this story, though, she slows down, takes more pauses and plays with the delicate rings on her right hand. “As a survivor of physical sexual assault, it adds a level of dysregulation,” she says. “It resurfaces trauma, while I’m trying to — in the middle of a fucking meeting.”
“There have been times in the past where I did have moments where I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I can survive this,’ ” Ocasio-Cortez says quietly. “And in those moments sometimes I remember, ‘Yeah, that’s the point. That is quite literally the point.’ I was the youngest woman elected to Congress, and it took over 200 years for a woman in her twenties to get elected to Congress, when this country was founded by 25-year-old dudes! Do people think that’s a fucking coincidence?”
From there, the hunger for more and more extreme fantasies can quickly escalate. “It’s bizarre, you tend to end up in this cycle of typing in a scenario, waiting five seconds until it comes up and, from there, chasing different scenarios — like having sex in the subway — that you can’t do in real life.” The possibilities of AI to turn an individual’s most niche fantasies into tangible images, all at the click of a button, are hugely compelling but, as my interviewee explains, it’s also potentially troubling for individuals who may struggle with compulsive porn use. “Live generation goon sessions will definitely become more popular,” he says. “I’ve seen people in Reddit threads who are like, ‘I can’t stop gooning over AI porn’. I agree — I tasted it and it was fucking addictive.”



















