American right-wing conservatives have started using an artificial intelligence tool called Dignifai against scantily clad women on social media.
The idea behind the Dignifai AI app is simple.
It’s a kind of filter that puts people in revealing photos in modest clothes and removes tattoos.
The idea of dressing women in modest dresses was born at the end of January on the English-language photo forum 4chan, which is similar to the Finnish Ylilauta.
The name of the artificial intelligence application comes from the English word dignify, which means to respect or value something.
Postdoctoral researcher at Turku College of Human Sciences and the John Morton Center Pekka Kolehmainen sees the popularity of the Dignifai artificial intelligence application as the far-right’s longing for traditional gender roles.
– The phenomenon is based on the prevailing view among the American far-right, according to which women with tattoos, piercings and who publish nude pictures degrade themselves, says Kolehmainen, who has studied the online conversations of the American far-right.
Some users have taken image manipulation even further. In individual pictures, women have been moved from gyms to kitchens, for example.
– This is how the idea of what is a natural environment for a woman in which she should work is created.
According to the expert, the Dignifai artificial intelligence can be considered one of the manifestations of the culture war.
In the United States, opinions about, for example, the place of women in society are very polarized.
On 4chan and X, discussions about the Dignifai AI use the words cleanse, liberate, depravity, and decency.
According to Kolehmainen, it is no accident. The word choices reveal the extreme right’s ideas about women and society.
– For example, summer dresses seem to be very common in image manipulations.
By dresses, Kolehmainen means the bell skirts that appear in several pictures. In the United States, they have strong cultural connotations of 1950s housewife culture.
Women who earn by their looks are infuriating
The Dignifai tool went viral when an American far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec published images edited with artificial intelligence in X to more than two million followers.
Most of the pictures feature young, slim, white women.
Women are usually public figures or earn money as content producers or game streamers.
Why is it precisely their suggestive outfits that want to be changed to please conservatives?
– In right-wing circles, it is related to the way society, opponents and images of the enemy are perceived. Women who are seen as gaining economic or social capital through their appearance are seen as enemies in this image, says Kolehmainen.
According to the expert, the artificial intelligence tool was created to annoy women who do not fit the role of a traditional woman.
– Based on the discussions, it seems that it is not an innocent experiment, but a political motive can be observed in it, with which one wants to attack women who are considered bad and to fantasize about what kind of reactions covering bare thighs causes in women, the expert says.
According to Kolehmainen, social media campaigns by far-right circles aiming for a “cultural revolution” on the 4chan platform are not rare, but usually the campaigners’ belief in their own potential for influence is exaggerated.
Although 4chan is an anonymous image forum, it has also managed to function as an organizing field for the right wing, according to Kolehmainen.
The power of the 4chan service was seen, for example, in the Gamergate discrimination campaign in 2014, where the extreme right painted women belonging to gaming communities around the world.
Artificial intelligence gave birth to deepfake porn
In 2023, the economic newspaper Bloomberg warned about artificial intelligence applications that are becoming more common, which can be used to remove the clothes of the person in the picture. The phenomenon is called deepfake porn.
Spanish police currently investigating a serious case where artificial intelligence was used to create nude photos of dozens of underage girls. The pictures were distributed in a Spanish school.
Another well-known case involves a pop singer to Taylor Swift.
of The New York Times According to the AI, a nude image of Swift was viewed 47 million times on X before the account that shared the image was closed.
In the Dignifai phenomenon, nude photos are not shared, but underwear photos are made into salon-worthy ones.
However, according to Kolehmainen, that does not mean that there are no problems with the use of Dignifai artificial intelligence.
– Both deepfake porn and Dignifai artificial intelligence clearly show the far-right’s imagined control or sense of power, says Kolehmainen.
In addition, image manipulations by artificial intelligence can violate copyright, as modified images are usually published without the consent of the person in the image.
Identity theft specialist Home Security Heroes State of Deepfakes –the report according to many of the problems related to the misuse of artificial intelligence especially affect women, children and sexual and gender minorities and can expose them to abuse.
– This harassment campaign connects to the anti-sex worker movement more generally and incites the idea that women are somehow responsible for social corruption, says Kolehmainen.
For example, the victims of deepfake porn are almost exclusively women.
The development of artificial intelligence is fast, but regulation is slow
Distinguishing a genuine image or video from a fake is becoming more and more difficult, but at the legislative level, the regulation of artificial intelligence is slow.
An agreement was reached in the European Union in December from the new artificial intelligence law at the end of nearly four years of negotiations.
The law sets new transparency requirements for artificial intelligence companies and obliges service providers to tell when images are produced by artificial intelligence.
With the development of artificial intelligence applications, technology is now practically within everyone’s reach.
According to the State of Deepfakes report, in 2023 it took an average of less than 25 minutes to make an AI fake, and the average cost of making an AI image was zero euros.
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