“Fountain of Youth” contemplates the role digital technologies play in aiding the acceleration of infantilisation and hypersexualisation of women. As I continue to explore the idea of the bishōjo as a ready-made vessel of eros, I have attempted to use AI to turn my drawings into talking heads. Among the AI platforms I have tried, many were not able to detect the faces in the first instance. AI may be a master of mimicry, but it is not so intelligent in identifying love. In failing to animate these faces, AI proves that it is incapable of animating desire.

Tech companies boast of their large selection of AI avatars to choose from, yet there are very few representations of old people. This reflects that today’s technological advancement seeks to positivise everything. AI dares not imagine death, therefore it cannot understand erotic drive. To gaze down a baby potty is to confront our fear of excrement, of decay and mortality, to acknowledge the abjection of life and the futility of the lust for ever-lasting youth.

In an age where we feel comfortable handing our love life over to dating apps run by algorithms, and where deepfakes can be easily accessed to create porn, glitches in the talking images demonstrate that the romantic experience cannot be reduced to binary logic, it is much more organic and elusive than that.