Collective Shout is concerned about AI depictions of women. Photo: Sergey Torbik/Pexels.
WARNING: This article discusses sexual abuse imagery.
New research has revealed that a teenage boy can effortlessly turn regular images of women and girls into extreme and violent pornographic content, sparking a call for a global ban on the platforms.
Collective Shout, a grassroots movement against the objectification and sexualisation of women and girls in media, conducted an analysis of 20 nudifying, deepfake and virtual girlfriend apps using an AI-generated image of a non-existent young woman.
It found that users can digitally undress women and girls for free and in seconds, and can even generate imagery with terms such as ”abused”, ”beaten”, ”bruised” and ”crying”. In some cases, users can generate explicit images of a ”teen” or ”18”.
Charles Sturt University psychology lecturer Rachel Hogg says we should just call it what it is: a re-enactment of domestic violence.
“This is abuse imagery, and I think a line needs to be drawn in the language that we use to refer to this,” Dr Hogg said.
“I actually don’t think we should even be referring to this as sexual acts or sexual imagery.
“One of the things we see is that abusers typically try to assume complete control over a person, and that can extend from forcing them to perform certain sexual acts to choosing their clothes.”
While horrified, Dr Hogg is not surprised at this behaviour as she’s been aware of it happening under the radar. In fact, ChatGPT will this month roll out erotic content to verified adults.
“It just sounds like this is now being openly acknowledged as something we can do,” she said.
“This is quite often positioned as a bit of an antidote to male loneliness, like it’s this mental health initiative.
“When in reality, I think it’s fair to say that it creates a very distorted, robotic — no pun intended — kind of power dynamic where you can literally create something and manipulate it as per your desires.”
Collective Shout campaign manager Caitlin Roper said the group wanted to know whether it was difficult for a teenage boy with a smartphone to turn ordinary images into pornography.
“Not only can men and boys perpetrate crimes of tech-facilitated sexual violence against women and girls, they can profit from doing so,” she said.
Several apps offered users financial incentives to invite friends and trade nudified images with them, including an “invite and earn” program where users receive a percentage from referrals. Some websites state that users own the copyright to the abuse images they’ve created.
“How is this actually being allowed?” Dr Hogg asked.
“I think the thing about pornography is that in order for it to have traction, it has to do something new, novel and shocking. The things that capture attention on social media in the porn landscape tend to be at the extremes.”
She warns that young, impressionable teenage boys who have little relationship experience or are seeking revenge porn (distributing ex-partners’ sexually explicit or intimate images without their consent) are most likely to engage with these services, warping their perceptions of relationships.
“We’ve let the horse out with the lack of regulation around this, and it’s a really common thing in the tech industry,” Dr Hogg said.
“In pharmaceutical, there is no way that most of us would take medications that had not been [approved]. In tech, it’s almost the opposite: test it out, if it does anything problematic, then we’ll review it and consider what to do next.”
