AI Art Censorship by Code: How MidJourney Flattens the Human Form
- martinbeck21
- May 5
- 15 min read
Updated: May 6
I. The Machine That Blinks
As an artist, I once struggled with oil on canvas, silverpoint, and chalk pastels; now, I wrestle with automated filters and vague community guidelines. I’ve spent decades rendering the human form — reverently, symbolically, sometimes erotically — only to be excommunicated by a platform whose intelligence was trained on the very images it now forbids.
What’s at stake isn’t just censorship — it’s the rise of MidJourney’s Standards of Mediocrity. A system that doesn’t merely suppress bodies, but chokes complexity. It punishes ambiguity, sterilizes symbolism, and crushes the very unpredictability that defines art.
At the start Midjourney was a reliable AI muse. A tool I used to conjure archetypes, sensual mythologies, and dreamlike figures — not porn, not shock, but symbolic bodies with depth and history. For a time, it was glorious. The AI responded like a gifted student, generating imagery that resonated with my lifelong aesthetic and psychological inquiry. I could even feed it my drawings as references, and it would echo my aesthetic closely.
But soon, the warnings began. Despite being careful, veiled, and artful, my prompts were flagged. My image references — direct extensions of my own practice — were rejected. I was told to avoid “fixations.” As if the nude body — which has been at the center of art, religion, and human longing since we first smeared ochre on cave walls — were a perversion rather than a prayer.
It was like being ghosted by a prude. An automated prude.
Eventually, I was banned. No explanation. Just a door slammed shut by a blinking algorithm convinced it was protecting the world from degenerate art. I submitted an appeal, but the message was clear: bans are rarely overturned. It would be funny if it weren’t so depressingly telling.
We used to fear a future in which machines would rise up and annihilate us — The Matrix, Terminator, pick your techno-apocalypse. But reality, as usual, is more banal. We’re not being vaporized by robot armies. We’re being erased, little by little, by platforms enforcing the aesthetic equivalent of Stepford Wives morality — bodies filtered, urges flattened, complexity replaced by PG-13 facsimiles.
And here’s the real punchline: while Midjourney censors my Dionysian, symbol-soaked bodies, it has no problem producing doe-eyed Disney princesses with impossibly tiny waists and smoldering gazes. The same AI that punishes a symbolic breast will gladly generate a thousand subtly sexualized avatars — as long as they don’t name the thing they are.
This is the cultural shadow at work. Jung would have a field day. On one side, repression: our squeamishness about bodies, our terror of desire, our suppression of emotion, our hunger for control. On the other, projection: our fixation with sanitized sexuality, our relentless reproduction of erotic imagery — so long as it’s dressed up in fantasy, innocence, or adolescent longing. The algorithm becomes our collective superego, censoring not what’s obscene, but what’s too honest.
So here I am, flagged by code and banned by anonymous humans — not because my work was dangerous, but because it dared to acknowledge that human beings have bodies. Beautiful, complicated, sacred bodies. And that, in this new world of machine-guided morality, is apparently a step too far.
II. The Body as Symbol, Not Sin and AI Art Censorship
The human body — particularly the nude — has always carried more than its skin. It is vessel, metaphor, threshold, and altar. In Jungian terms, it is the site where spirit and matter, psyche and shadow, collide. The body is not simply what we have; it is how we know ourselves — vulnerable, desiring, mortal.
But in the world of generative AI, the body has become suspect. Stripped of context, symbolism, and intent, the nude is reduced to a “risk vector.” A liability. A potential violation of vague “community standards” that reek of outsourced puritanism. The sacred is collapsed into the salacious by machines that understand neither. It’s hard not to think of Jenny Fields, the fierce feminist from John Irving’s The World According to Garp, who wrote a book titled A Sexual Suspect — not because she was dangerous, but because she lived outside prescribed norms. For her refusal to conform, she was nearly assassinated. And Garp, her son, was killed by a prudish radical who literally cut out her own tongue — a brutal symbol of how fear of sexuality often turns inward, mutilates itself, and lashes out in the name of purity.
It’s not just absurd — it’s tragic.
Historically, the nude was never neutral. Think of the Venus of Willendorf, round and potent, a Neolithic invocation of fertility. Think of Michelangelo’s David — defiant and divine, every sinew carved as invocation. Or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, where the body emerges not from shame, but from foam, silk, and myth. These weren’t scandalous. They were holy.
Even when transgressive — Goya’s Nude Maja, Schiele’s contorted figures — the nude always gestured beyond itself. It was never simply about exposure. It was about truth. Transformation. Eros not as pornography, but as psychic energy — the life force that animates becoming.
And then there’s Robert Mapplethorpe — whose photographs of Black men, leather culture, and classical male beauty ignited a firestorm of outrage in the late 1980s. His work was never gratuitous. It was precise, devotional, composed. These were documents of life and desire — unapologetic, luminous, and subversive. But they dared to shift the male gaze onto the male body — and not just any male body, but queer and racialized bodies. For that, he was branded obscene. Not because the images were without merit, but because they dared to show the sacred where others saw only taboo.
These weren’t scandalous. They were reverential.
Now contrast that with Midjourney’s filters. Try entering a prompt referencing Venus. Use classical language. Keep it restrained. Still — the image blurs. The breasts disappear. The hips are shrouded. The figure becomes a void, or worse, a childlike cartoon.
In this new AI regime, it’s not the clothing that’s removed, but the context — and with it, the body’s dignity, reduced to something dirty, suspect, or obscene.
And what’s left is aesthetic cowardice — a visual culture that cannot tolerate the very forms it was built upon. That censors not because of obscenity but because of discomfort. As if the curve of a thigh might trigger the apocalypse.
We are not protecting children. We are infantilizing adults.
And we’re doing it at the behest of algorithms that don’t understand art, meaning, or metaphor — only that somewhere, sometime, someone might complain. And so the human enforcers have seemingly abdicated judgment and accountability in exchange for brand safety. It’s easier, after all, to train a model to scrub out a nipple than to teach it to recognize a symbol.
So better to erase the body entirely. Replace it with high-fantasy armor or airbrushed innocence. Let’s have breasts, sure — but make sure they’re armored. And mouths open in a gasp of wonder, never in desire.
This isn’t prudence. It’s a failure of cultural nerve.
And it’s proof that in the war between repression and imagination, repression has found its ultimate ally: software trained to mistake shame for safety, and simplification for virtue.
III. Hannah Wilke: Beauty, Illness, and Erotic Defiance
Hannah Wilke made art with her body — and not just of her body, but through it. In life, she was unapologetically sensual, intellectually rigorous, and visually bold. Her early works — like the S.O.S. — Starification Object Series — dared viewers to sit in discomfort. Gum chewed into vulva-like shapes was affixed to her bare skin in pin-up poses. The contradiction was deliberate: sexual invitation meets satirical scarring. She made herself both the object and the author of desire.
But Wilke’s most devastating work came later, in the twin shadows of mortality and family legacy.
In 1978, she photographed her mother, Selma Butter, during her decline from breast cancer — a stark, intimate confrontation with the decay of flesh and the vulnerability of care. The project, Intra-Venus: Her Mother’s Deathbed, was immediately polarizing. Some called it exploitative — too raw, too private, too brutal. But it was also Wilke’s way of breaking a silence: this is what a body looks like after beauty. This is what happens to the vessel we worship when it loses symmetry and control.
Years later, Wilke developed cancer herself. And she turned the lens, unflinchingly, on her own body. In the final Intra-Venus series, we see her — bald, swollen, marked by IV lines, lipstick sometimes smudged. There’s a terrible beauty in the images. They are unguarded. Both warrior and ruin. And once again, they challenge us to ask: what is truly obscene?
Is it the image of a woman dying — who insists on being seen? Or is it the cultural compulsion to sanitize, to avert the gaze, to Photoshop our decline into invisibility?
Wilke’s work is an exorcism of our cultural shadow. She refused the split between sex and sickness, between the sacred and the shamed. And in doing so, she became offensive in the most vital sense of the word: she pushed back. She confronted a society terrified of aging, of death, of bodies that no longer serve the fantasies we project onto them.
I knew Hannah because I worked at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, the gallery representing her. I was twenty-three. She was magnetic, brilliant and somewhat abrasive — a woman who had long since shed the need for social filters. In one conversation, she spoke frankly about early sexual experiences. Candid, uninvited, jarringly intimate. I didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t harassment, but it wasn’t neutral. I felt small, flooded. I admired her and yet recoiled — not from her sexuality, but from the asymmetry of our roles, our ages, our readiness.
It took me years to integrate that moment. Now, I carry it as part of my apprenticeship — not just in art, but in complexity. She showed me something raw. Something unresolved. And though it shook me, I no longer view it as a wound. I see it as an initiation — a confrontation with how we carry our stories in the body, and how difficult it is to be fully seen, scars and all.
Would AI understand any of that? Would it know the difference between exposure and vulnerability? Between eroticism and exploitation? Between embodiment and indecency?
Let me rephrase.
Would Midjourney allow any of Wilke’s images to be made on its platform?
Her breasts would be blurred. Her IV lines would be deemed graphic. Her gum sculptures would be flagged as suggestive. Her lips would be watched for “fixation.” Her illness would not be permitted to coexist with her sex.
She would be, like so many others, quietly deleted.
And that, more than anything, shows us what is truly obscene.
IV. Edwin Dickinson & R. B. Kitaj: Ambiguity, Desire, and the Unreadable Body
Edwin Dickinson’s paintings are often shrouded in mystery, inviting viewers into dreamlike realms where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur. His works, such as An Anniversary (1920–21), Woodland Scene (1929–35), Composition with Still Life (1933–37), and The Fossil Hunters (1926–28), are imbued with personal symbolism and emotional depth. These pieces are believed to reflect Dickinson’s complex feelings towards his father’s remarriage to a much younger woman, a dynamic that introduced psychosexual tensions into his art. The juxtaposition of aged male figures with youthful female forms in these paintings suggests an exploration of desire, memory, and familial relationships.
In The Fossil Hunters, for instance, the depiction of an old man and a young woman amidst a surreal landscape evokes themes of mortality, legacy, and the unconscious. The presence of symbolic elements, such as a Beethoven mask and fossil imagery, further underscores Dickinson’s introspective approach to art, where personal history and universal themes converge.
R. B. Kitaj, on the other hand, embraced a more overtly intellectual and sensual style. His paintings often intertwine textual references with vivid imagery, creating layered narratives that challenge viewers to engage both emotionally and intellectually. Kitaj’s personal life, marked by complex relationships and controversies, seeped into his art, making his work an arena for exploring identity, desire, and cultural memory.
Despite their differing styles, both Dickinson and Kitaj confronted the intricacies of human experience, unafraid to delve into themes that many might consider uncomfortable or controversial. Their willingness to expose vulnerability and grapple with societal taboos stands in stark contrast to the sanitized outputs often produced by AI-driven art platforms.
In reflecting on their works, one can’t help but question: Would today’s AI algorithms, with their rigid content filters, allow for the creation of such deeply personal and provocative art? Or would these masterpieces be deemed too ambiguous, too sensual, or too challenging for the sanitized digital canvas?
V. Self-Portraiture, Shadow Work, and the Algorithmic Guillotine
In the twilight of my tenure with Midjourney, I embarked on a deeply personal journey: crafting AI-generated self-portraits that delved into the recesses of my psyche. These weren’t mere images; they were visual diaries, confronting themes of toxic masculinity, the intricate dynamics between artist and model, exploitation, desire, and the visceral reality of aging.
One series depicted the archetype of the domineering male artist, juxtaposed against the vulnerability of the muse. Another confronted the physical limitations of age and arthritis, with my growing sense of enchantment with the world. My explorations of Jungian dynamics, spirituality and myth are portrayed ironically as self-portraits as a self-conscious Christ-like figure. These images weren’t designed to titillate or provoke but to examine the facets of identity and corporeality retrospectively.
Wilke, Kitaj, and Dickinson also ventured into self-portraiture — not always literally, but through archetypal surrogates and psychic projections. In each case, the self was not idealized but interrogated. Wilke’s camera turned on her own illness, sexuality, and mortality, exposing a raw, embodied vulnerability few dared to name. Kitaj often embedded himself in his canvases as a fragmented, erotic, guilt-ridden intellectual — the artist as both voyeur and subject, riddled with longing. Dickinson’s spectral male figures — slouched, haunted — suggest a deep ambivalence about masculinity and aging. All three artists encountered their darkness and revealed it with clarity and, at times, disarming humor. These were not self-flattering portraits; they were confessions. Mirrors cracked just enough to let the psyche breathe.
Yet, despite the introspective nature of my self-portraiture, Midjourney’s moderation system deemed them inappropriate. Prompts referencing the male form, vulnerability, or even the nuanced interplay of power dynamics were flagged. The platform, in its quest for a sanitized aesthetic, failed to differentiate between genuine self-exploration and content that might be deemed offensive.
This censorship felt not only personal but emblematic of a broader issue: the suppression of authentic human experiences in favor of a homogenized, risk-averse digital landscape. By stifling such expressions, platforms like Midjourney inadvertently discourage artists from confronting and sharing their truths.
Art has always been a medium through which society grapples with its shadows. By censoring these explorations, we risk losing the very essence of what makes art transformative.
VI. The Infantilizing Algorithm and AI Art Censorship
It’s remarkable — and frankly absurd — how quickly the digital revolution pivoted from liberating expression to policing it. The same technology that promised to democratize creativity now wags a paternalistic finger at anyone who colors outside its increasingly narrow lines. Don’t be too sexual. Don’t be too symbolic. Don’t explore power, gender, death, the body. In short: don’t make art — make content.
Midjourney’s language is especially telling. Users are warned against “fixation,” “fetish,” “unsafe content.” The implication is that any repeated interest in the human form — especially one involving vulnerability or desire — is pathological. Not artistic. Not symbolic. Unhealthy. It is base AI Art Censorship.
It’s infantilizing. Not just because it treats adults like fragile children, but because it erases the long tradition of artists wrestling with their own complexity, their own shadow. Dickinson’s brooding guilt, Kitaj’s tangled eroticism, Wilke’s ferocious embodiment, my own explorations of aging and control — all of it flattened into potential violation.
This is not morality. This is control disguised as caretaking.
And beneath it lies a cowardice that has nothing to do with protecting users and everything to do with avoiding liability. The algorithm is not acting ethically; it is acting defensively — built not to nurture culture, but to avoid lawsuits and PR disasters.
But art without risk is propaganda. Decoration. Branding.
This suppression of complexity has deeper psychological consequences. When Jung wrote about neurosis, he described it not as a disease of weakness, but of split — of refusing to acknowledge the full range of our instincts and needs. A culture that pretends it has no shadow — no sexual hunger, no ambivalence, no destructive impulses — will soon become unwell. And more dangerously, unreal.
By banning the very prompts that allow us to explore these instincts symbolically, AI platforms encourage psychic repression on a mass scale. And repression doesn’t disappear. It festers. It returns — not as art, but as projection, paranoia, and scapegoating.
Let’s be clear: creating an AI that filters out child abuse or targeted harassment is necessary. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about mythic, complex, adult work being scrubbed because it’s “too much.” Because it doesn’t wear its intentions like a label.
We’re talking about symbolic language being mistaken for a terms-of-service violation.
And in doing so, we are teaching a generation of emerging artists not to reflect, but to please.
Not to reveal, but to self-edit. Not to risk, but to comply.
VII. The Aesthetic Purge: Degeneracy, Cleanliness, and the Corporate Superego
History has a way of repeating itself — sometimes with jackboots, sometimes with code.
In 1937, the Nazi regime staged the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition (Entartete Kunst) in Munich, displaying over 650 confiscated works by artists like Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz. The point wasn’t just to denounce the art — it was to mock it. Paintings were hung crookedly, paired with jeering labels, and lit to look grotesque. It was a propaganda stunt, yes — but also a cultural purge. Art that explored fragmentation, interiority, sensuality, or existential despair was cast out. Too abstract. Too Jewish. Too queer. Too unresolved.
In its place, the regime elevated what it called “Great German Art”: muscular nudes in sunlit fields, glowing mothers and stoic soldiers carved from marble, bodies idealized into submission. The kind of art that didn’t ask questions — it saluted.
It’s easy to file this under “evil history” and move on. But censorship doesn’t always come draped in flags. Sometimes it arrives with a friendly interface and a ToS agreement.
Midjourney is not staging purges. But it is promoting an aesthetic eerily close to a different kind of ideological machinery: the house of Disney. And here, too, the historical echoes are instructive. Walt Disney’s own legacy is more complicated than the sanitized myth suggests. Though not a Nazi, he was cozy with fascist sympathizers, hostile to unions, and flirted with authoritarian tropes both politically and artistically. His work valorized purity, discipline, and a fantasy of American innocence that left no room for bodies in flux — or artists in dissent.
Today, Midjourney overflows with princesses: pristine, dewy-skinned, de-sexed yet subtly eroticized. Their eyes are enormous. Their limbs impossible. Their smiles vacant. They are the ideal AI muses: pretty, pliant, post-human.
It’s not surprising. If you squint at Midjourney’s aesthetic defaults, you can see the contours of a Disneyfied utopia — everything glossed, exaggerated, and stripped of shadow. That’s not an accident. That’s training data. And it’s ideology.
Because make no mistake: ideology doesn’t only live in manifestos. It lives in faces. In curves. In what gets rendered and what gets blurred. In which bodies are allowed to speak — and which are quietly removed.
We don’t need literal fascism to end up with art that serves the same function: conformity. Compliance. Beauty drained of risk.
The artists once labeled “degenerate” are now revered. But in their time, they were condemned not for what they made, but for the truths they told — truths about aging, desire, suffering, fragmentation. The truths Midjourney’s filters still can’t handle.
And that should worry us.
VIII. AI as Collaborator, Not Warden
Here’s the thing: I don’t hate AI. In fact, I find it a fascinating tool with remarkable potential.
At its best, Midjourney was a revelation — not a replacement for my art, but a companion to it. It extended my reach when arthritis made it harder to draw and paint. It translated my symbols, my interests and my aesthetic DNA into images that surprised me. It offered a kind of call-and-response with the unconscious — a pixelated dream dialogue.
That’s what made the censorship so painful. Not just the denial of access, but the betrayal of potential. Because AI doesn’t have to be a warden. It can be a collaborator. A medium. A mirror. A trickster. Even — at its most uncanny — a kind of ghost. It also has the potential to reveal our personal and cultural shadow.
But collaboration requires respect. It requires nuance. It requires a system that trusts artists to explore dangerous questions — not one that pre-emptively closes the door, scrubbing out anything that might trouble the shareholders.
Midjourney (and platforms like it) are now so risk-averse they can’t distinguish between exploitation and self-exploration. Between erotica and archetype. Between intimacy and offense. And that binary logic is suffocating art.
Real art lives in ambiguity. In discomfort. In paradox. It asks you to risk misunderstanding. To sit with what you can’t immediately name.
When I created AI self-portraits, I wasn’t just playing with vanity. I was exploring the fragility of the aging male body — and not just my body, but the broader psychic structure of aging within patriarchy itself. What happens to the older artist in a culture obsessed with youth, novelty, and quick consumption? What happens to desire, to power, to self-worth, when the body no longer commands attention but instead begins to vanish? These portraits were attempts to hold that vanishing in the light — to name it, to witness it.
To confront patriarchy is not simply to denounce it; it is to look unflinchingly at the parts of it that live in us, especially those that fester in silence. As an older male artist, I’ve had to examine the privileges I’ve inherited and the pressures I’ve internalized — the expectation to dominate, to produce, to remain invulnerable. Shadow work is never comfortable. It asks us to encounter the truths we most want to avoid. But it is only in that encounter — honest, unsanitized, often ambivalent — that real transformation becomes possible.
AI can help us do that. It can follow us into the cave. Not the cave of ignorance, as in Plato’s allegory, but the cave of shadow — the one the artist, the analyst, the dreamer must enter to retrieve what the culture cannot yet name. In Jungian terms, this is the descent into the unconscious — the confrontation with what has been exiled, feared, or forgotten. The cave is where the raw material of transformation lives. But AI can only go there with us if we demand more than a frictionless interface. Only if we treat it not as a tool for comfort, but as a medium for confrontation.
The danger isn’t that AI will become too powerful. It’s that it will become too safe. Too polite. Too obedient. A generator of mood boards, not meanings.
I want more than that.
And I believe it’s still possible.
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