Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or unwilling to enforce their policies about who can buy ads on their platforms.
While parent company Meta’s Ad Library, which archives ads on its platforms, who paid for them, and where and when they were posted, shows that the company has taken down several of these ads previously, many ads that explicitly invited users to create nudes and some ad buyers were up until I reached out to Meta for comment. Some of these ads were for the best known nonconsensual “undress” or “nudify” services on the internet.
The draw to these apps is that the user can exploit anyone they want. It’s not really about sex, it’s about power.
Human society is about power. It is because we can’t get past dominance hierarchy that our communities do nothing about schoolyard bullies, or workplace sexual harassment. It is why abstinence-only sex-ed has nothing positive to say to victims of sexual assault, once they make it clear that used goods are used goods.
Our culture agrees by consensus that seeing a woman naked, whether a candid shot, caught inflagrante delicto or rendered from whole cloth by a generative AI system, redefines her as a sexual object, reducing her qualifications as a worker, official or future partner. That’s a lot of power to give to some guy with X-ray Specs, and it speaks poorly of how society regards women, or human beings in general.
We disregard sex workers, too.
Violence sucks, but without the social consensus the propagates sexual victimhood, it would just be violence. Sexual violence is extra awful because the rest of society actively participates in making it extra awful.
Dude I can imagine people naked in my head.
Yes I think this ai trend is sad and people who use these service, it says a lot about what kind of person they are. And it also says a lot about what kind of company meta is.