Created in 1966, Eliza was the first program in human history to simulate a psychotherapeutic conversation. Much like today’s chatbots, it engaged in dialogue with people, seemingly helping them work through psychological concerns. In reality, Eliza only pretended to understand or to learn from its interlocutors – just as Eliza, the heroine of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, perfected the imitation of upper-class speech. Both Elizas – the computer program and the stage character – maneuvered within patriarchal structures by means of mimicry and emotional labor, creating an impression of social “flexibility.”

As Dr. Gražina Bielousova has noted, “feminized care” is one of the most invisible and undervalued forms of labor, most often assigned to women. The name Eliza reminds us that imitation, servitude, and endless compliance have been inscribed into the history of technology from the very beginning, framed within the logic of inexhaustible, tireless care and creativity.

In the works of Lithuanian artists Julija Goyd and Ivona Tau, based in Berlin and Warsaw respectively, artificial intelligence also imitates – yet here it openly acts as a co-author, imitating itself. In their separate and joint artistic experiments, the same visual resources intersect but diverge in different directions. AI-induced glitches expose not only mistakes but also the limits and specificity of the artists’ dialogue with the system. Promptography1 is the transition of photography into the regime of language: the camera is replaced by words, whose combinations generate images. The “prompt” becomes the machine’s mechanism. Authorship in working with AI is deconstructed – distributed among the artists, language, data models, and the system itself. Yet AI fails to sustain the image of a flawless body or a perfect face of care – it distorts it, laying bare the very structure of visual and linguistic imitation.

The “care” of artificial intelligence, and the artistic dialogue with it, emerge in the folds of the female body as rendered in Goyd’s and Tau’s works. Through rewriting the body of care, what has been cast aside – beyond youth, proportion, or idealized form – can be acknowledged, embraced, and valued. Cracking bodies and fractured images resonate, and through the interplay of image and text, open new possibilities to rethink what might still be called an aesthetic user interface.

Notes

1 The term “promptography” was first used by photographer Christian Vince in a Facebook post explaining his decision to decline the Sony World Photography Award for an AI- generated image.