SEEKING: MACHINE LEARNING ENGINEER / CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST
Artist-Led Generative AI + Digital Autonomy Project
I am developing an experimental art and technology project centered on three ideas:
AUTONOMY. SELF-OWNERSHIP. FREE EXPRESSION.
The project grows out of my lived experience as a reported victim of cybercrime, exploitation, and trafficking.
During the period I am documenting, I outwardly appeared to be living a relatively ordinary life: I was a woman in my late twenties and eventually my early thirties, going to work and building a career in the nonprofit sector.
At the same time, I allege that I was experiencing a profoundly different reality involving digital intrusion, coercive control, exploitation of my labor, and eventually sex trafficking.
One of the most difficult parts of reporting that experience has been communicating something that was often technologically mediated and largely invisible from the outside.
Today, I frequently find myself creating visual representations simply so other people can conceptualize what I am describing.
That tension has become part of the artwork itself.
THE ARTISTIC PREMISE
I suspect generative and algorithmic technologies were among the tools used during portions of the experience I am documenting.
I am now deliberately reclaiming generative AI as an artistic medium.
Instead of using it to suppress or distort my expression, I want to use it to exercise authorship over my own story.
The resulting work will use satire, editorial illustration, personal archives, and generative imagery to portray my lived experience and my interpretation of what I witnessed.
The artwork is not intended to independently prove every underlying allegation.
It is a method of visual testimony, reconstruction, satire, and reclamation.
The fundamental reversal is:
I control the archive.I control what enters the system.I control what the system learns from.I control what is created.I control what is published.
That intentional control is central to the work.
THE TECHNICAL PROJECT
To support that concept, I want to develop an image-generation model trained from scratch on an artist-controlled dataset consisting exclusively of material I deliberately provide from my own digital and creative archive.
This is intentionally not a Stable Diffusion, FLUX, Midjourney, LoRA, DreamBooth, or other fine-tuning project.
The goal is for the model to begin from randomly initialized weights rather than inheriting the visual knowledge of an existing image-generation model.
The closed dataset is not the subject of the artwork.
It is an artistic constraint built around consent, provenance, autonomy, and control.
WHO I’M LOOKING FOR
I am looking for a machine-learning engineer or creative technologist with experience in some combination of:
• PyTorch
• diffusion models and/or GAN architectures
• computer vision
• training generative models from scratch
• custom image datasets and preprocessing
• Hugging Face Diffusers or comparable frameworks
• GPU/cloud training environments
• model checkpoints and reproducible workflows
• technical documentation and provenance
Experience collaborating with artists, researchers, digital-humanities projects, journalists, human-rights projects, or experimental media is especially welcome, but not required.
The most important thing is understanding that the technical system exists in service of an artist-led project about human autonomy, rather than being the subject of the project itself.
PROSPECTIVE COMMISSION
The project is currently in development and funding has not yet been secured.
For fundraising and budgeting purposes, I am currently anticipating approximately:
$5,000–$8,000 for the initial technical build
depending on architecture, dataset preparation, experimentation, training requirements, documentation, and final scope.
Hourly billing is also accepted, with an anticipated range of approximately $100–$175/hour, depending on experience and the agreed scope.
If additional project funding is secured beyond the initial development target, there may be opportunities to expand the technical scope, development phases, responsibilities, and overall compensation.
Any paid work, rates, ownership terms, deliverables, and project scope would be established in writing before development begins.
CURRENT STAGE
This project is currently in the design, research, collaborator-development, and fundraising stage.
I am not asking anyone to perform unpaid engineering work.
At this stage, I am interested in connecting with people who find the concept genuinely compelling and are willing to have an informal conversation about technical feasibility, potential architectures, limitations, ethical considerations, and what a future collaboration could look like.
If we determine that there is a strong fit, I may also ask whether you would be comfortable being identified as a prospective technical collaborator in future grant and funding proposals.
Participation in early conversations does not create an obligation to join the eventual project.
WHY THIS PROJECT
A major contradiction sits at the center of the work.
For years, I appeared externally to be an ordinary woman going to work and participating in everyday life.
My reported experience of that same period was radically different.
Now, in order to communicate what I allege happened, I am creating images that allow viewers to visualize experiences that were largely invisible from the outside.
Generative AI becomes part of that reconstruction.
A technology I suspect played a role in limiting my autonomy becomes a technology I deliberately control in order to exercise it.
In a moment when generative AI art is often dismissed as “AI slop,” while other artists are actively using generative systems as a legitimate medium of creative expression, this project asks:
How does the perceived value of AI-generated art change when the system functions exclusively on data supplied and controlled by the artist-and when that same process becomes an act of reclaiming authorship, expression, and control over an identity that the artist believes was previously violated?
Autonomy. Self-ownership. Free expression.
The technology is the medium.
The dataset is controlled by the artist.
The artist retains authorship over the process.