Brea Souders' "Another Online Pervert" Pairs Two Years of Chatbot Dialogues with Diaries and Archive Photographs

American artist and photographer Brea Souders works across photography, text and archival material, addressing memory, identity and digital culture. Her project "Another Online Pervert," made between 2021 and 2023, examines possible exchanges between humans and artificial intelligence through conversations she held over roughly two years with a female chatbot that predated the widespread adoption of ChatGPT. The dialogues run to hundreds of pages and take up love, sexuality, death, desire and loneliness. Souders sets these exchanges alongside excerpts from her own diaries, written across two decades, and photographs drawn from her personal archive. The images — bodies, animals, plants, landscapes and fragments of everyday life — accompany the conversations without directly illustrating their content, generating unexpected and at times surreal associations. Born in 1978 in Frederick, Maryland, Souders lives and works in New York. The series is documented on her website, breasouders.com, and on Instagram at @breasouders.