Around this time, Herndon and Dryhurst, who is also her primary collaborator, had been experimenting with the embedding of “Holly Herndon” in the data used to “train” text-to-image generators such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. Herndon, who is forty-three, has sea-glass-blue eyes, a round, pale face, and persimmon-colored hair; she tends to style it with bangs, a short bob in front, and a long braid in the back. The embedding of the Virgin Mary might be reduced to something involving her posture, gaze, and infant son; Herndon’s embedding is tied to her distinctive look.
In 2021, she and Dryhurst began working on a series of computer-generated images, grouped under the title “classified,” that explored her embedding in an artificial neural network created by OpenAI. Though some of the art works are unsettling portraits of Herndonesque women rendered in the style of an oil painting, many are more playful: “x | o 40,” which used the prompt “A building that looks like Holly Herndon,” shows a stately white structure with brick-red bangs, two porthole windows, and pursed pink lips; “x | o 41” depicts a figure with buggy blue eyes and a red braid which could be fan art for “The Simpsons.” “My identity in models is determined by aggregate cliches scraped from the web,” Herndon recently tweeted. “I’m mostly a haircut!”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/holly-herndons-infinite-art