Three Degrees of Representation (3°R) Auditing GenAI through Lesbian Film Data

A note on terminology: When deciding on the terminology to use in my GenAI queries, I settled on working with the term “Lesbian” rather than “wlw” (women loving women), “gay,” or “queer.” Although these terms overlap, and I’ve used all of them to describe my own identity and interests, I felt that “Lesbian,” as the least ambiguous descriptor, would help specify the scope most clearly and would elicit outputs that hint at the prevalence of “Lesbian” as a label for GenAI training data. Working with the term “Lesbian” also provides an opportunity to track its appearance in AI-generated text, including in descriptions of AI-generated images.

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I approached this project from my position as an avid consumer and middle-aged fan of popular lesbian films. As is true for many queer-identifying people, representation in culture has been more than simply sought after. I have craved and loved and loathed it. Even before I knew how to describe my way of being in the world, I longed for stories that would trace my curiosities and help me discover and articulate my existence as a queer woman growing up in a restrictive culture – in an Alpine town governed by Catholicism in 1980s Austria. Through stories, I also hoped for insight into the variety of experiences and bodies that all claim belonging in the queer portion of the intersectional Venn identity diagram.

However, in the culture consumption of my teenage years, I have no memory of encountering renderings or perspectives of queer women and my understanding of Lesbians was decidedly that of women performing physical entanglements for the benefit of men (some of whom were, at the time, obsessed with a VHS copy of the film Bilitis) and that definition didn’t serve as a descriptor of parts of myself. And, so, when I moved to New York and finally did have access to stories about and by queer women on TV and in film, and when the internet made access to message boards and fan culture possible, my queer and specifically Lesbian culture consumption regularly included film and TV criticism, comment sections of fan forums.

Crafting representation was and is a high-stakes responsibility for creators and viewers alike, and the ability of viewers to talk back to creators, esp. in the world of television, via message boards and comments hastened confrontations about accountability and the harms of pernicious tropes, like “bury your gays” which refers to the (even in 2016 still astonishingly high) death rate of gay protagonists in TV representation (Waggoner).