Self Portraits in AI

A piece about the academic headshot, AI collaboration, self-portraiture, and traditional sketching. It was presented as a work-in-progress at Provoking Curriculum 2025 under the title Pie from plastic apples, and again at CSSE 2026 as Self-Portraits in AI: Fictopoiesis and AI-Mediated Educational Research, with several of the drawings shown here.

The series above runs a photograph of my own face through successive generative passes. The first frame is a photograph. By the seventh the skin has become paint, the wall behind has curdled into texture, and the face is still recognisably mine while no longer being a likeness of anything. Nothing is added and nothing is removed; the image is simply asked, repeatedly, to be itself.

I also trained a ChatGPT model on my own writing, doctoral work, and research papers, and used the generated images as material for sketching a self-portrait by hand — the graphite drawing above, where the face arrives in facets and the hair dissolves into the same scribble as the background. The work investigates the layers of filtering, mediation, and self-construction at play in both human and machine-generated representations of identity — what is smoothed away, what is insisted upon, and what returns when the machine’s version is redrawn in charcoal.

I wrote the thinking up for Substack as Self Portraits in AI: on the academic headshot, self-dissection through portraiture, identity as curriculum, and the fiction of a face.