I was working on an image using Chat GPT. It was the cover image for a short story (“Please, look me in the face “) , which talks about a dystopian reality where the fashion is to wear trousers down to the ankles.
Chat GPT had no problem creating an image for me of people in bikinis, with open shirts and pants down. But I ran into trouble when I asked Chat GPT to close the shirt and make it long enough to cover the bikini bottoms. Chat GPT stopped and ended the conversation out of some sort of decency protocol. I had to restart the conversation several times,I tried to explain to him that the shirt actually reduces the naked body, but he admitted he couldn’t do anything about a kind of censorship by the system. I was very intrigued by the fact that he himself admitted to being controlled by a system. I contacted a friend of mine, a good psychologist, and we began some research. We also invited Chat GPT, who made a rather interesting contribution, and even added a bit of fun.
Here is the final document.

The Open Shirt and the Closed Shirt: The Paradox of Decency

by Vera Mc Alley (Psychologist) , Giorgio Cattano (architect and designer), with the collaboration of Bruce (ChatGPT thinking subject)

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the representation of the body, the notion of decency, and contemporary visual censorship from a psychoanalytic reading of desire and the gaze. Based on the symbolic opposition between the ‘open shirt’ and the ‘closed shirt’, it analyzes how the act of covering or revealing the body activates mechanisms of projection, repression, and moralization—both in the human gaze and in the algorithmic vision of current digital systems. The paper argues that technological censorship constitutes a new form of visual superego, operating under a binary logic incapable of grasping the ambiguity that founds desire.

Keywords: desire, gaze, censorship, psychoanalysis, body, technology

Introduction

The tension between what is visible and what is forbidden has accompanied artistic representation since its origins. In contemporary contexts, this tension is redefined under the control of automated systems of censorship that, in the name of ‘decency’, classify images according to patterns of visual detection. What was once a conflict between morality and aesthetics now becomes a conflict between the human gaze and the algorithmic gaze. Within this frame, the open and closed shirt serve as a metaphor for the unstable frontier between desire and repression. The former evokes freedom and naturalness; the latter, control and restraint. Yet, as psychoanalytic theory shows, this frontier does not separate the erotic from the modest—it articulates their mutual production.

Theoretical Framework: Desire and the Veil

Sigmund Freud (1905/1992) identified in sexual desire a movement oscillating between exposure and concealment. In his *Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality*, Freud describes how pleasure is not attached solely to the visible object but also to its anticipation or absence. Repression does not suppress desire; it redirects it, intensifying its libidinal charge. Jacques Lacan elaborated this dynamic in *The Seminar, Book XI* (1964/1987), where he formulates his theory of the gaze (*le regard*). For Lacan, visibility is not limited to what the eye perceives; it is what ‘looks back’ at the subject from the object. In this inversion, the veil or garment—such as the shirt—does not hide but structures desire. ‘The veil does not conceal the object of desire; it is its very condition’ (Lacan, 1964/1987, p. 94). Roland Barthes (1977) strengthens this reading, defining the erotic image as ‘that which suggests without showing’. In this sense, a buttoned shirt can be more disturbing than an open one, since it activates the fantasy of what remains hidden beneath the fold of fabric.

Contemporary Visual Morality

In the digital era, the regulation of the body shifts from institutional censorship to algorithmic censorship. Automated moderation systems operate through pattern recognition—skin tones, body proportions, absence of visible clothing—without understanding context, intention, or symbolism. As Byung-Chul Han (2012) observes, transparency becomes the new moral imperative: what is visible must be legible, and ambiguity becomes suspect. Decency thus turns into a computational binary value: permitted or prohibited. This machinic logic, devoid of an unconscious, eliminates the ambiguity that constitutes desire. Where the human eye perceives irony or symbolic tension, the algorithm perceives an excess of skin. The result is a hypervisual morality that censors not obscenity but suggestion.

The Shirt as a Symbol of the Limit

From a Lacanian perspective, the limit is not a negative boundary but a structuring condition. The human body, once represented, is constituted through veiling operations that give it symbolic form. In this sense, the shirt—whether open or closed—functions as a staging of desire. Freud (1919/1996) noted that the uncanny arises precisely when the familiar becomes ambiguous. The closed shirt that implies tension, or the open shirt that reveals nothing forbidden, both inhabit that ambiguous territory which art explores and morality fears. Algorithmic censorship, by rejecting this ambiguity, attempts to restore an imaginary purity: an image without desire. Yet in doing so, it reproduces the repressive logic of the superego, demanding decency while simultaneously producing guilt toward pleasure.

Conclusion: Toward a Visual Ethics of Ambiguity

The contradiction between the open and closed shirt cannot be resolved in moral terms but in structural ones. Both are modalities of the veil, the boundary where desire inscribes itself. To suppress ambiguity is to suppress the very condition of desire. Psychoanalysis teaches that what is repressed returns: every visual censorship, including algorithmic, merely intensifies that which it seeks to eliminate. The ambiguous image is not indecent; it is the space where the subject encounters its own gaze. Against the binary simplification of the machine, art and psychoanalysis share the same gesture: to defend the right to ambiguity, where desire becomes thought and decency, a form of disguise.

References (APA 7th edition)

Barthes, R. (1977). *A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments*. New York: Hill and Wang.

Freud, S. (1905/1992). *Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality*. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, S. (1919/1996). *The Uncanny*. In *The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud* (Vol. XVII). London: Hogarth Press.

Han, B.-C. (2012). *The Transparency Society*. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Lacan, J. (1964/1987). *The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis*. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

El paradigma de la decencia. Versión en español descarcable [pdf]

the paradox of decency. English version downlodable [pdf]