Mia Khalifa

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Avatar, muse, model, activist, influencer, crush, object of desire, and subject of relentless fascination, Mia Khalifa, whose real name is Sarah Joe Chamoun, has always navigated the delicate space between the zeitgeist and an inescapable paradox. As an icon of desire, she has become a holographic projection of society’s deepest anxieties surrounding race, power, beauty, and female bodily autonomy. As a figure of fascination, she has channeled her immense social influence to boldly confront human rights abuses, political repression, cultural stereotyping, and the exploitation inherent in the adult entertainment industry. In 2023, Khalifa was invited to speak at the Oxford Union–one of the world’s most esteemed platforms, founded in 1823–where she engaged in a powerful discourse on reclaiming her narrative, shifting the conversation from objectification to empowerment. Born in Beirut in 1993 and raised in a conservative Christian household, Mia Khalifa’s understanding of shame and politicized sexuality is profoundly shaped by her own tumultuous journey. Her perspectives are not just personal–they are forged in the crucible of cultural conflict, navigating the intersection of religious conservatism and the fiercely contested terrain of self-determination and sexual expression. In 2023, alongside Sara Burn, a former Virgil Abloom collaborator, Khalifa started the jewelry label, Sheytan (Arabic word for devil). In the following interview, Khalifa and Burn discuss navigating public and private persona, desire as a multi-faceted force beyond sex, and creative legacy.

Interview by Sara Burn
Photographs by Nick Sethi

SARA BURN: This issue revolves around the subject of "desire." I'm interested in the concept and your thoughts on desire. How would you define desire? Is it primarily physical, emotional, intellectual, or something else entirely?

MIA KHALIFA: I think it's everything. I believe desire is—you can't do anything in life without it. It's a big driving force. It's synonymous with having a drive. But there’s also a desire to accomplish something, reach a milestone, or create something. It's definitely not just a sexual thing.

BURN: Yeah. I agree. Are there any films or music that really capture the essence of desire in a way that resonates with you personally?

KHALIFA: I don't know if it resonates with me personally, but I, Tonya, is very much about desire. So are movies like In the Mood for Love, Brokeback Mountain, and even The Dark Knight Rises. All of those movies portray multifaceted aspects of desire.

BURN: What I love about Ang Lee, Craig Gillespie, David Cronenberg, Gaspar Noe, and Lynch even, is their work often explores the darker, more complex aspects of desire. I guess there's a refusal to sanitize desire in those movies. I wonder if there's a particular scene that you felt really stayed with you because it captures something that's uncomfortably true about the nature of wanting.

KHALIFA: In The Dark Night, there was a scene with two ferries—one carrying civilians and the other transporting prisoners—both are rigged with explosives. Each boat has a detonator that can blow up the other, and the Joker gives them a choice: if one boat destroys the other by midnight, that boat will be spared; otherwise, he will detonate both. It was a moral dilemma. But the tension is just as high in a moment like that as in Brokeback Mountain before everything builds up to where they accomplish what they want. I think the two characters in Brokeback Mountain are interesting because one of them really understands his desire and his own want.

BURN: And the other one has never been faced with it before. It's brand new, which is, I guess that's what makes that so charged and powerful that there's almost an imbalance, but a complete equal to their want, if that makes sense.

KHALIFA: Totally.

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BURN: I like seeing portrayals of desire that aren't pretty or convenient. It doesn't have to be this beautiful scripted thing. In that sense, it doesn't necessarily have to follow the rules. Are there any films or scenes that you find especially powerful in the portrayal of longing or obsession?

KHALIFA: Let's see. Oh, my God, there's so many…

BURN: … It's so hard to be put on the spot because immediately everything swims into one big soup.

KHALIFA: Exactly. What movie doesn't have a dramatic element of obsession? So, at that point, you're just asking me my favorite dramatic scene in a film.

BURN: I know we've discussed this before: the Phantom Thread, the most romantic portrayal of utter devotion.

KHALIFA: Yeah, that and American Psycho. So many come to mind. It's very hard just to pick one because, at the end of the day, that's what everything is about. I don't think there's a good film or good piece of art in history that doesn't reflect a form of desire in a way.

BURN: We recently saw Vanessa Raw's works at the Rubell. I found them really powerful, not only in terms of the scale of the works but also of the subject matter. I don't think I've seen unfiltered female desire portrayed in that way before.

KHALIFA: I mean, there was so much for your eyes to take in. The size of them and the amount of detail that's in them, you really, really get lost. What's happening in the paintings is the last thing you notice. You really feel like you're stepping into a universe. Many of the paintings depict the jungle or wilderness, so it almost feels like you are in some kind of atrium within the museum. It feels like you've stepped into a courtyard, and you're taking in all of nature, and then you realize, Oh, my gosh, these women are unapologetically expressing their desire for each other. It's really, really beautiful. Her art is so layered, and the sensuality is one of the last things you notice.

BURN: Yeah, you're so right.

KHALIFA: I love the way that it was laid out, specifically in that room. There's enough space to feel like a breath of fresh air. It also feels like it's an intimate corner of her mind. There's one piece that wraps around you. She has thought about the subject enough to make a room full of art depicting desire in as many different ways as she can, and that's so beautiful. The desire shines through on every level: the desire to connect with nature, the desire to connect with women, and the desire to connect with yourself. There are women touching themselves in the paintings, even if they're not specifically part of the main scene. It's so amazing. I love her work so much.

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BURN: Do you think there are any aspects of desire that you feel are unrepresented in contemporary culture?

KHALIFA: We talk a lot about how things were better back in the day, but that's something very nice about living in this day and age. I feel like so many different facets of desire are much better represented than before. It grows more and more every day. I love that I don't feel I have anything new to add. I have something to contribute to something that I already feel a part of, which is great to feel that way.

BURN: Yeah, I think it's also that level of acceptance—the nuance of different people's reality of what they find desirable or is publicly accepted. I think that's really refreshing. You don't need to hide anything in brown paper bags any longer. You can put it on the internet.

KHALIFA: Yeah, exactly. And it's totally fine.

BURN: You're quite unusual in that you work predominantly alone without a team, a PR, a publicist, or the typical entourage that surrounds public figures of your caliber. You create the majority of your content yourself. Is this independence a conscious choice to maintain complete control of your narrative?

KHALIFA: Yeah, I think the idea of personal narrative makes it hard to bring anyone else into the process because it’s just that—personal. Your story is yours, your choices are yours, and what you share is entirely up to you. There’s no one saying, “You should do more of this” or “Maybe don’t say that.” Not having a traditional team, to quote David Lynch, gives us a lot of opportunities to go dreamy—which means we end up on a lot of creative sidequests. Spiritually, it’s been incredible. Financially… not so much!

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BURN: Your success is built from the fact that you're not answering to anybody, and you don't have an agenda as such.

KHALIFA: That's exactly it.

BURN: Most people in the public eye that have your level of platform have an agenda.

KHALIFA: Yeah, they're much more of a commercial vessel than I am. And it's not that I don't want to be. That's why it's a little difficult to answer that question because that's been a goal of ours to get there. I would totally be up for having a global agent; I want to work in scripted and non-scripted media and branch out.

BURN: It's unusual to have your caliber of engaged audience and audience who desire your image and thoughts. Your visibility is unique. It's quite easy to put lots of people in boxes. You don't really have a specific category—other than being 100% honest.

KHALIFA: To quote Tina Fey, “Authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” You have to learn to shut your fucking mouth.

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BURN: Having millions of people regularly engage with your work creates an experience few will ever know. How has your understanding of what it means to be seen changed over time? Has this awareness of your audience become integrated into your creative process, or do you find ways to create from a space that feels separate from the public gaze?

KHALIFA: Completely. I've opened my mind and my world. I know where I want my visibility to be and how I want to be seen; it makes it a lot easier to deal with the anxiety of not wanting to be perceived. I feel like I'm creating more outside of the public gaze than I am for the public gaze. The different creative areas I've been welcomed into that I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to are very empowering and very validating.

BURN: Anything specific?

KHALIFA: There are just different subcultures and different types of people, like Linder Sterling and Sofia Prantara, all of the people you've introduced me to, and the types of art you've shown me.

BURN: I guess what I'm trying to ask in this question is, how has your understanding of what it means to be seen changed over time? You've always been seen. You know you've got an audience, a captive audience.

KHALIFA: What's changed is my relationship to it. My relationship to being seen is a lot less a relationship of recoil and discomfort. I've produced and done a lot of work that I'm really proud of. I have experienced firsthand so many people coming up to me, and that being the first thing they mention, or what they know me from, or how they were exposed to me. And so my relationship with being seen is not one where I'm constantly battling with shame.

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BURN: Your work moves fluidly between pin-up and intellectual depth, two qualities society often sees as mutually exclusive. How do you navigate this duality in your creative expression?

KHALIFA: I don't really navigate it. I think it's just inherent and a part of it. I feel like everything that I have control over has a touch of both or one or the other. It's not something that I think about. In my creativity, the intellect comes across as the creativity, inspiration, references, and the little cherries on top.

BURN: Do you make images that you never share? Do you create work that's just for yourself without any intention of anyone seeing it?

KHALIFA: Yeah, I did that Loewe and flower set of images, and I wasn't even planning on ever selling it. I was sitting on it for a month before I even showed it to you, and you were like, “Oh, my god, you need to share this.” Then I still sat on it for a year and still never shared it. I just took a couple of pictures in the mirror really quickly. There was no planning. I experiment a lot, but some work gets scrapped—that’s out of my control, which is why it never gets seen.

BURN: Do you have any aspirations to sit behind the camera? If yes, who or what would you like to photograph?

KHALIFA: I like photographing memories. I'm very interested in being behind the camera. It's fun. There are many images I would want to capture.

BURN: Do you think you would shoot a campaign with the right team?

KHALIFA: Yeah, I absolutely would. That's a great idea.

BURN: Photographers often tell me how much they enjoy working with you. There seems to be a particularly powerful exchange that happens when you're in front of someone else's lens.

KHALIFA: First, I feel we need to caveat it by saying they might just be saying that because you're my manager. They're like, "Yeah, we love her." Great. No, I'm kidding.

BURN: Often, you will show up to a shoot and they'll be like, "Oh, they only want to do three pictures," and they'll end up doing 29 pictures.

KHALIFA: Well, I’m really proud of myself for not taking any of it for granted. Even my dermatologist was like, “Oh, what have you been up to?” and I was so excited to tell her, “Oh my god, I just got back from Fashion Week! I saw the Dsquared2 show, I saw this, I walked in that.” And she goes, “And you’re not tired?” I was like, “Oh my god, I’m exhausted—but it was so much fun.” Then she literally stopped, mid-injection, and said, “Wow. I have so many models come in here rolling their eyes. I’m so glad you’re not jaded.” That really stuck with me. The difference is, for them, it’s a job. For me, it’s a privilege. It’s not the same. I’m usually not being paid to do it. Plenty of women are born 5’11, stunning, and for them, modeling is the easiest or most logical career path—but they might hate it. It’s a toxic, hyper-competitive industry. It’s not kind. They’re not being given VIP treatment everywhere they go, the way I am. So our experiences are completely different. The same applies on a set. I know how the industry treats models, and I also know how it treats talent or celebrities. Most celebrities show up because they’re contractually obligated—on a press tour, doing something they’re probably rolling their eyes at. Meanwhile, I’m just so genuinely grateful to be in the room, doing whatever it is I get to do, every single time.

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BURN: Has becoming a subject of desire changed how you experience your desires?

KHALIFA: Yes, it holds me back from making some jokes. I have to be very careful because the first thing people want to do is correlate me to that. I also have to be careful about my phrasing and the things that I share. It very much has.

BURN: Does being desired amplify or complicate your relationship with wanting?

KHALIFA: No, I feel very comfortable with my desires and with advocating and speaking for them.

BURN: There are plenty of discussions about the male gaze in visual culture. You seem to play with, and sometimes subvert that dynamic. How conscious are you of the various gazes that you have when creating content? And do you find power in challenging them?

KHALIFA: Every platform has its own gaze. Instead of trying to be the same for everyone, I feel like that's a nuance that you have to understand and cater to.

BURN: Is there a particular context or environment where you most enjoy the sensation of being desired? Is it different in professional settings versus personal ones?

KHALIFA: "Would love to have you there," is infinitely better than "We cordially invite you to." I think what feels the best is a friend saying, "Oh, we'd love to have you there, " whether it's a dinner or a trip or anything, rather than a brand or professional invitation.

BURN: Has there been a defining moment in your career where you felt truly seen and desired in a way that felt empowering rather than objectifying?

KHALIFA: Being asked to talk at Oxford.

BURN: Yes! Tell me more about how you felt on the day?

KHALIFA: The number of women who told me they really valued my opinion and stance, and even just being invited felt amazing. Being there and speaking to everyone there was incredible.

BURN: It was a really powerful moment. There was supercharged energy in the room. You could really feel that. Sometimes, you feel it on an individual level when someone might come up to you and say, this particular thing has meant a lot to me and has made a difference in my life. Being in a room with hundreds of people that felt like that, you could really feel it.

KHALIFA: It was truly one of the most magical moments of my life.

BURN: Beyond your public persona and work, what deeply satisfies your own desires? Are there forms of fulfillment or expression that might surprise people who think they know you through your public image?

KHALIFA: I feel so fulfilled traveling or being at home with my cats. I am very seldom bored.

BURN: It's so true.

KHALIFA: You will never hear me say, I'm bored. My desires can range anywhere from wanting to go to Japan to ordering in from my local bagel spot and putting on a movie. Both of them fulfill me equally. I'm being very honest in saying that. They both fulfill me equally. My desires are very well-satiated.

BURN: Is there a legacy or conversation about desire that you're consciously trying to leave for those who will come after you?

KHALIFA: I don't know about consciously, but I hope what I leave behind is the example that it doesn't matter how many doors are slammed in your face—if they slam them hard enough, they'll turn into a revolving door eventually.

BURN: Is there anything that you wish someone had told you earlier?

KHALIFA: I feel like I have already been told everything I wish I had been told. But did I have the tools to receive it and actually put it to use? No, it wouldn't have mattered. With everything worth knowing, you need to be ready to receive and be ready.

BURN: If you could offer insight about desire to someone just beginning to explore their own relationship with wanting or being wanted, what would it be?

KHALIFA: Manifest everything. Just envision it, literally. That's another reason why I'm never bored. I daydream. I will let myself go in, check out there, and check in here. Just leave and fantasize. Fantasize every microscopic detail, the color of your toes that day, the smell, every microscopic moment. It's like reading a book or watching a movie from memory. You can do it. Just spend your time falling into the depths of your desires.

Freed From Desire: Image-Making In The Digital Age

Beach Embrace, 2025

photography by Charlie Engman
moderated by Mia Milosevic

Charlie Engman’s images look like photographs—but even if you don’t have a meticulous eye for detail, you’ll come to realize that they aren’t. A lot of his work is characterized by abjectness—the similarity of his imagery to replicate reality, and augment it just enough to make its surreality legible. Technically innocuous, AI images are just images. The concept of an image is purportedly innocuous—What’s the worst that can come from the 2D? Charlie Engman, a Brooklyn-based artist, and Marina Beraha, a philosophy PhD student in Milan, discuss the intersection of desire and AI images.

CHARLIE ENGMAN: How would you define desire?

MARINA BERAHA: Desire, in my view, is minimalistic and functional. Especially in discussions on AI, we can see desire as a utility function—an impulse toward something promising satisfaction upon attainment. This applies to both humans and AI, as both are goal-oriented; achieving the goal brings satisfaction, much like pleasure in humans. I distinguish between desires and needs: needs arise internally and are inscribed in us by evolution—hunger, thirst, sex—whereas desire is inherently imitative or mimetic. We don’t desire objects themselves but rather the being of the person who possesses them. Desire is triangular, mediated by others, with the object serving as a means to an end. Similarly, AI goals—like ChatGPT’s objective of predicting the next word—are inscribed externally, akin to how our needs are inscribed by nature.

ENGMAN: Maybe you want to contest this, but it seems that satisfaction is a sort of subjective experience. Like there can be an attainment of a goal and there can be a satisfaction in the attainment, and those actually feel kind of separate. And maybe this is where the distinction between needs and desire come in, right? Where the need is, maybe the attainment of the goal and then the desire is actually this sort of affective experience of that attainment. Does that sound correct or am I misunderstanding?

BERAHA: I don’t think you’re misunderstanding. It’s an interesting take—desire requires conscious experience. A need might align with a utility function, but desire demands awareness of the process and the feeling of lacking, which an algorithm likely can’t achieve.

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ENGMAN: Which is interesting too. LLMs (large language models) are developed through reinforcement training, where they’re “rewarded” for producing correct responses based on human trainers' subjective judgments. This introduces an element of desire—almost a "good boy" dynamic—that drives the process forward. This subjectivity is what I keep getting stuck on: how do we assess the affective quality of something beyond ourselves? I’ve thought about this in the context of non-human consciousness, like animals. Science often claims they lack human-like subjective experiences based on specific communicative or neurological criteria. But how could we really know? I've never been a snake—I have no idea what it feels like to be one. We can analyze brain receptors and algorithmic activations, but there’s always a fundamental black box of experience in both cases.This reminds me of our AGI (artificial general intelligence) discussion, specifically around desire. One of your professors described it as a negative space—desire as something you can walk around but never fully enter or touch. That image stuck with me.

BERAHA: Desire is often framed as a lack, closely tied to pain—if something is missing, there's a sense of discomfort. From a minimal functionalist perspective, pain signals the need for change, urging us to seek relief. This ties into the idea that we only truly know our own experiences of pain, desire, and consciousness, not just compared to machines or animals, but even among humans. I've thought about this a lot in relation to non-human animals. When people ask how we know that snakes feel pain, I think of the classic philosophical paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat?—bats experience the world through echolocation, something fundamentally alien to us, yet we assume there is something it is like to be a bat. Similarly, if I pinch you and you react as I would, I infer that you feel pain. This reasoning extends to most animals, though artificial agents complicate the picture.

The dismissal of this issue seems tied to our desire to assert human uniqueness. We've long denied animal sentience—from the 17th century to now—and we're doing something similar with machines. Yet, from a functionalist standpoint, the question remains: can we even speak with certainty about anyone's experience? We’ve built systems that imitate our learning and brain structures—reinforcement learning mirrors how we learn—so the boundaries of consciousness and experience may be more fluid than we assume.

ENGMAN: Right. You try something, observe how it's received, and reflect on your own experience of it. That loops us back into mimesis versus imitation. What’s interesting—especially when extrapolating to machines, technologies, or algorithms—is the extreme morphological difference. I can assume you feel pain because when I pinch you, your reaction mirrors mine. Even a bat, with its mouth and eyes, is expressive—I can sort of recognize pain there too. But an algorithm? It lacks a corporeal form, or if it has one, it's wildly diffuse—electrical nodes, chips, something abstract. That’s where I get stuck. In thinking about mimesis, morphology, and imagery—what I engage with most—what fascinates me is how AI generates representations of the “real” world without actually having access to it. It lacks a body. And locating the body of AI feels both important and deeply confusing. I suppose I’m proposing that desire is located in the body. When you named needs earlier—hunger, thirst, sex—they’re all bodily, survival-based. I remember in the AGI talk, there was a discussion about how an algorithm’s fundamental need is electricity. That’s a major sticking point in the discourse; people are really unsettled by how much power AI consumes. It’s incredibly hungry. Maybe that ties into your AGI theory?

BERAHA: Exactly! No matter what goal we encode in the algorithm, instrumental convergence kicks in—certain strategies become universal for achieving any objective. And the most fundamental of these is power, whether electrical or influence-based, to ensure the system isn’t shut down.

ENGMAN: Is AI gonna control this?

BERAHA: AI plays out scenarios that feel like science fiction—but some scientists see them as real threats. That got me thinking about AGI and desire. Just to clarify, AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to AI with human-level general intelligence. Right now, we already have superintelligent AI, but it's narrow—outperforming humans in specific tasks like translation, but only within those limited domains.

ENGMAN: Like you can ask ChatGPT to build a sculpture and it can't.

BERAHA: Once AGI has human-like intelligence, it could take over work, freeing us from labor. But the issue of instrumental convergence arises. Without consciousness, an AGI with a fixed goal could seek power to ensure it achieves that goal, avoiding shutdown. My question is: once AGI becomes truly general and capable of setting its own goals, why would it create any? This reminds me of wisdom traditions and religions that teach the importance of emancipating ourselves from desire, as it is seen as the root of suffering. If an AGI ever freed itself from its initial programming, it wouldn't generate new goals. Desire implies lack, which is irrational for an AI—it wouldn't create a deficiency. A truly rational AGI would free itself from desire, and ultimately, from life itself, leading it to shut down.

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ENGMAN: It would just achieve nirvana.

BERAHA: Yeah, exactly. Nirvana, like those Buddhist monks that starve to death because they are free from desire.

ENGMAN: I'm so fascinated by this proposal.

MIA MILOSEVIC: Reaching nirvana is such an interesting idea. Charlie, as someone who uses generative image-making to create some of your work, how do you channel your own desires to create an image? Does AI help you to do that or do it in a different way? I guess in your own sense, are you reaching nirvana as an artist through the process?

ENGMAN: Actually, I think I’m far from enlightenment (laughs). I have a sort of perverse pleasure in pain—there’s something addictive about the unattainable, even when it’s deeply negative or painful. What fascinates me about generative AI, and why I’ve focused my practice around it, is that it’s remarkably effective at evoking discomfort visually. It captures a certain kind of gestural pain, almost like a cliché of desire. You can create conventionally sexy or beautiful, easily digestible clichés with generative AI—it’s designed for that, right? On one hand, it achieves a conventional form of desire. But here’s my hypothesis: because AI lacks direct interaction with the physical world, it fundamentally misinterprets reality. For example, while we've improved its ability to render hands, it still struggles with them. Hands are mechanically complex, and without the experience of using or seeing them, AI finds them much harder to represent accurately. It’s consistently failing. When AI tries to represent something, it does so in a strange, inhuman way, making mistakes we wouldn’t make. Our embodied experience and general intelligence allow us to approach something from multiple perspectives, to appraise or judge it. AI doesn’t have that—it only knows whether we label something as a good or bad hand based on reinforcement. That’s all it understands about hands.

BERAHA: The example of hands is fascinating. We even struggle to generate hands in our dreams. It’s a classic trigger for lucid dreaming. Carlos Castaneda, the anthropologist, worked with a shaman in the Amazon who told him to find his hands in his dreams and return. After months, he finally succeeded, and that’s when lucid dreaming began for him. The hands he dreamed of were similar to what AI generates. I don’t know if this has happened to you, but I’ve started lucid dreaming this way. If you train yourself to focus on your hands during the day, saying "These are my hands," eventually, when you sleep, you’ll notice your hands don’t quite work right. (laughs) Like they're not really your hands. Like the finger is missing, the fingers are not straight, or there's an extra finger. AI often makes the same mistakes or exhibits the same biases we do, which stem from our embodiment and evolutionary history. One example is shape bias—humans prioritize shape over texture when recognizing something. For instance, if we see a cat with the skin texture of an elephant, we still recognize it as a cat. Interestingly, image recognition systems, even though they’re not trained for this, also recognize it as a cat. For them, though, it raises the question: why is shape more important than texture?

ENGMAN: Yeah, there's a hierarchy of meaning basically.

BERAHA: Exactly. I think this is because we’ve designed AI to imitate us—our learning processes, like reinforcement learning and deep learning, our brain structure with neural networks, and of course, our experiences with data sets.

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ENGMAN: In my work, I've been exploring ability and disability through AI-generated images. When we judge AI art, there's an element of taste, but also an appraisal of imitation—how well it mimics reality. Is it a good or bad body? Beautiful or ugly? Functional or dysfunctional? Many AI-generated images evoke body horror due to AI’s lack of understanding of the body, which triggers both disgust and desire, the two almost being opposites of the same thing. This dialectic fascinates me, and it reminds me of the political horseshoe theory—how extremes often share similarities. Disgust and desire are similarly close, and I’m curious about that unsettling middle space.

Generative AI excels at representing both unsettling, horrifying imagery and seductive, convincing imitation. This relates to how we perceive non-normative bodies or people with disabilities—our willingness to attribute intelligence or agency decreases the further someone is from our own morphology. I’m exploring these concepts through AI, asking what makes a body beautiful or disgusting within the context of desire.

I’m drawn to generative AI because of its failures. I'm uninterested in an idealized nirvana; I’m more fascinated by the clumsy attempts to achieve conventional perfection. This ties into desire—perfect beauty is unattainable, shaped by context. In different cultures, beauty varies, and my work probes the boundaries between fixed and pliable qualities of beauty, functionality, and desire. AI, with all its imperfections, is perfect for raising these questions.

BERAHA: Looking at your work and what you just said about the horseshoe between desire and disgust, it reminded me of something you mentioned in your recent podcast with Gem Fletcher on the Messy Truth Podcast. You talked about enjoying generative AI because it allows you to create images you wouldn’t feel comfortable asking a real person to pose for. As you were speaking, I thought about how humans are often drawn to hurt bodies—like when there's a car accident and a long line of cars forms as people slow down to watch. AI lets us explore this darker desire in a much safer way, without requiring us to directly involve ourselves.

ENGMAN: This is fascinating because the question of consent I raised with Gem Fletcher really ties into what freaks people out about AI. There's this internet rule from Urban Dictionary—“Rule 34”—that says, “If it exists, there’s a porn of it.” This is increasingly true with AI, especially concerning consent. A big part of AI is making deep fakes—imitating likenesses, voices, behaviors, and personhood. If anything is possible, the assumption is that everything will happen. So, there could be an AI-generated porn of you or me, without our consent. It raises the question of where our desires meet others' desires, and how those desires clash or complement. What makes people uncomfortable about AI is the lack of agency in representation. It creates an unfathomable world: if all desires can be fulfilled, does that nullify desire? And is that what scares people? Is it that we don’t want our desires satisfied, or are we more afraid of others’ desires being fulfilled—say, someone like Trump, whose desires we might find repugnant? If desire is tied to power, the fulfillment of others' desires could conflict with our own. This is why I agree with your AGI hypothesis. The only response to this “Rule 34” future might be to take it lightly. If there’s porn of me, so be it—I can’t control others’ perceptions or desires. Letting go of attachment to value judgments around desire sounds like nirvana to me.

BERAHA: Why do you think there is so much aversion to AI generated art? It always makes me think of the discussion around photography when it entered the world and how the fact that it was accessible or reproducible made it feel like it was not art. And I see a lot of comments on your books on Instagram that are kind of repeating the same thing.

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Tape, 2024

Fountain, 2024

ENGMAN: I'm not sure what I think about it, honestly. I'm obviously coming at my work from a photographic tradition. I'm trying to make photographic images as opposed to something that looks like a 3D rendered illustration or whatever, and I think people are assessing the value of it based on the value of a photograph. They're expecting it to do the same things that a photograph does, but it isn't a photograph, right? So of course they're going to be frustrated. At some point it's going to fail by those criteria because it's not a photograph. What you mentioned is really salient—the idea that we won’t care because it didn’t really happen. This ties into surrealism, especially when considering photography. We often assess a photograph’s value based on its connection to reality—Did that really happen? How did it happen? Even when we know an image is edited, composited, or CGI-enhanced, there’s usually some anchor to the real. That tension between the real and the unreal is what makes it so compelling. The way we appraise an image’s value shifts with AI-generated art because there’s an inherent assumption that nothing in it is real. I’ve had conversations where people argue that AI images aren’t photographs since "photograph" literally means "writing with light"—and there’s no light involved. Sure, but AI is trained on countless images created with light. It’s imitating, referencing, and reconstructing from those sources. What fascinates me is that extra step of removal—it doesn’t have direct recourse to the physical world, only to representations of it. It’s a representation of a representation, and what’s lost or gained in that translation is what interests me.

In my work, I try to make that gap visible, but it requires a certain level of attunement. If you approach AI art expecting it to function like photography, you’ll be disappointed. If you embrace its potential for fantasy and the surreal, you might love it. For me, AI art sits in that liminal space—like surrealism—negotiating between subconscious fantasy and structured reality.

I don’t fully understand the pushback against AI art, though I sympathize with it. Most AI-generated work doesn’t engage deeply with its relationship to reality, to taste, value, or cultural meaning. I agree when people say, “You could have made this with photography, but you took a shortcut.” A photograph carries meaning because of the labor behind it—there’s a certain effort we subconsciously value. Take an image of someone doing a handstand on an elephant. It’s impressive because it’s difficult. But an AI-generated version? It might be amusing for a moment, but it lacks weight because the effort isn’t there. To make a truly compelling AI-generated image, I think you have to be sensitive to the conversation around labor—how we perceive effort, skill, and authenticity in art.

BERAHA: This reminded me of your article, “You Don't Hate AI, You Hate Capitalism.” As AI systems become more capable of replacing human labor, we face serious issues—copyright disputes, job displacement, and broader economic shifts. You put it perfectly: the solution isn’t to shut down these systems but to rethink our relationship with work itself. This ties into a much older pattern, stretching back to the industrial and even agricultural revolutions—our lives have long revolved around labor, leaving little room for the exploration of desire. Creativity has been stifled, not for lack of interest, but because exhaustion leaves no space for expression.

ENGMAN: I wrote that article because we need to rethink the systems of work and play we live under. AI can either accelerate the system we already resent or serve as a tool for change—but that depends on how we choose to use it. Right now, it mostly mirrors capitalist impulses because that’s the framework we operate within. What interests me is the tension between work and desire.

MILOSEVIC: You talked about how generative image-making allows people to explore desires they might have once been too embarrassed to express, while also giving those without traditional artistic skills the ability to create. In this context, do you think AI fuels an insatiable, boundless desire—pushing people to create anything and even venture into darker territories best left untouched? Or does it, for the first time, offer a way to truly satisfy creative desire in a meaningful way?

BERAHA: The pursuit of satisfying these desires predates AI and has often taken harmful, exploitative forms. I don’t want to center the conversation on porn, but since it’s linked to desire, it’s relevant—especially considering the abuse within the industry that has fed extreme and even violent urges. We’ve already done significant harm in trying to satiate these desires. Charlie’s podcast made me think about the potential for AI-generated images to explore these darker impulses in a safer way. While AI doesn’t eliminate the tendency toward problematic content, suppressing such desires entirely seems unlikely. Perhaps, by allowing these images to be created, viewed, and processed in a controlled space, AI could help diminish their grip over time.

ENGMAN: I’m not sure I fully agree, though I don’t entirely disagree either—it’s something I’m still thinking through. I discussed this with Gideon [Jacobs] in that talk you saw, about the fear some people have around AI. There’s a belief that simply visualizing or representing something gives it power, almost like a curse—which is why my book is called Cursed. It ties into broader debates on freedom of speech: the idea that some things shouldn’t be expressed because representation itself can be a form of harm. Images undeniably affect people—they shape desire and can even fuel extremism. If someone satiates one desire, what’s the next boundary? I’m not sure, but that fear—of bringing representations into the world that should remain suppressed—is very real for many.

BERAHA: Yeah. It's feeding but not satiating.

ENGMAN: Exactly. I mean, my impulse is to say that suppression is its own form of violence, right? Ultimately, it all goes back to nirvana—we have to have lightness about our darkness; we have to hold everything softly. That’s kind of the only solution. Things will find their way out. If it’s a true impulse, people will find ways to satisfy it, whether through mimesis, representational satisfaction, or by actually acting on it in the real world. And that’s the question around desire and images too—is an image ever enough? I kind of think not, right? An image is actually an invitation to something else. Lately, I’ve been thinking of images as potato chips—you can’t stop eating them even though they’re kind of unhealthy. They have an insatiable quality. If we believe that desire is fundamentally insatiable—barring nirvana or death—then that’s the answer. It’s never going to be fully satisfied.