Remember when AI was new & exciting…? …when investors weren’t yet chomping at the bit to throw money at useless “AI” features, image generators were solely for then-president Joe Biden shooting lasers out of his eyes, and Google search results were… well, not exactly GOOD, but the AI Overview wasn’t superglued the top of the screen, taking up valuable real estate on your eyeballs that could be better spent on whatever else it is you sick freaks look at all day? I remember. I was one such sick freak, and around that time, I noticed a specific type of AI content crop up before almost any other: fat superheroes. A realistic photo of fat Superman sitting in a cafe, or fat Joker sitting in a cafe, or fat Batman sitting in a cafe… there were a lot of cafes. Personally, I blame HISHE.
But why fat superheroes? What makes this the first thing people use a burgeoning technology for, out of everything else?
I had my own hypothesis: a fat superhero is a rare sight to see. You have your Blobs & Bouncing Boys, superheroes & villains whose whole identities revolved around being “the Fat One”; then you have your Faiths & Goldballs…es, still fat from the start but with far more sincerity. Both are few & far between, to say nothing of quality. It makes sense that people who simply wish to see more bigger bodies (whether because they’re big themselves or because it’s just their taste) would jump at the chance to do so given an easy & accessible option. Comic book superheroes have been a big thing for some time now, why not give them the bodies to match? It’s hard, being soft & excluded.
It’s also possible that these were just being put out by one or two people feeding their niche; after all, one of the main draws of AI is the speed of output: while it takes a human being hours to make one masterpiece, an AI can generate hundreds of images in just an hour alone, though whether or not any of them are masterpieces is another conversation entirely. But no, while there were a handful of repeat customers (in particular, Matty Blades appears to have made most of the images I saw randomly browsing Google images back in the day, including a well-memed image of a supersized Superman sitting in a diner), that doesn’t explain why it was so widely propagated on every platform from Instagram to Facebook to YouTube.
Now that AI is a lot more common, we see a certain type of user crop up over and over again: “artists” who prefer not to get into the actual creative process, people who see art as an aesthetic or a commodity to be bought/sold rather than a means of personal expression. These people are often to right of the political spectrum, where folks are more likely to make fun of other people’s differences. So you might think THIS is the answer, that people do it because it’s funny — simple enough.
But if you look closer at the reactions to these images, you may find something unexpected… or completely expected, if you’ve been on the ‘net long enough.
Go to YouTube, for instance, and search up “fat superheroes”. Amid live-action gross-out skits for kids, you’ll see Shorts where some rando in the corner gives a thumbs-up while superheroes & their AI-generated counterparts fly across the screen. Half the comments have laugh emojis. The others have hearts — literally, heart emojis, all in a row as far as the mouse can scroll.
So, that’s it, then. To some, it’s a joke; to others, it’s a fetish. The fat experience in a nutshell. So what do we take away from this?
If this phenomenon proves anything, it proves that there’s a demand for this type of content, for one reason or another. But we don’t just WANT fat heroes — we NEED fat heroes. We can’t go about life with our biggest exposure to fat people (or OTHER fat people) being caricatures cooked up by a computer. Even by laughing, the people who do so signify a willingness to engage with characters in this demographic; imagine they find something like that, but with the coherence & sincerity of a human being, waiting on a shelf in a comic book shop or a Walmart rack for them to pick up. Imagine one of those heart emoji commenters finding something they can hold in their hands and not just watch on a screen.
To any artists or writers out there, it’s hard to think how you can survive in a world where robots can do all the work for free while our work gets stolen for their sake. It’s a cynical world. But the enemy of cynicism has always been sincerity. Be sincere. Be unapologetic in your love for bigger bodies, for bodies of ALL sizes. Because if we don’t, who will?