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.
Imagining and creating physical (even digial) material are different levels of how real and tangible it feels. Don’t you think?
There is an active act of carefully editing those pictures involved. It’s a misuse and against your intention when you posted such a picture of yourself. You are loosing control by that and become unwillingly part of the sexual act of someone else.
Sure, those, who feel violated by that, might also not like if people imagine things, but that’s still a less “real” level.
For example: Imagining to murder someone is one thing. Creating very explicit pictures about it and watching them regularly, or even printing them and hanging them on the walls of one’s room, is another.
I don’t want to equate murder fantasies with sexual ones. My point is to illustrate that it feels to me and obviously a lot of other people that there are significant differences between pure imagination and creating something tangible out of it.
Oh no, hanging the pictures on your wall is fucked.
The difference is if someone else can reasonably find out. If I tell someone that I think about them/someone else while masturbating, that is sexual harassment. If I have pictures on my wall and guests could see them, that’s sexual harassment.
If I just have an encrypted folder, not a problem.
It’s like the difference between thinking someone is ugly and saying it.