Why we should all be concerned about ‘artificial’ women
How virtual women and real violence are connected
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TW - this blog contains references to sexual assault and violence against women and girls
“Your beauty is absolutely breathtaking! How do you manage to look so effortlessly stunning every day?” This is one of thousands of comments on Spanish model Aitana López’s Instagram profile. The answer to this question, however, is a simple one. Because she’s not real.
The fact that Aitana López is an AI-created influencer does surprisingly little to stop real human beings from communicating with her. And who can blame them, when she posts pictures of meals she is unable to eat, clothes she has no form to wear, and radiates a personality that is perfectly manufactured for us to like her? Everything about her mimics human existence to an eerie likeness. But mixed in with the thousands of compliments, emojis, and sexually explicit comments are the occasional voices of confusion from the outside world. “I’m lost. Is this real?”
Similarly, the fast fashion company SHEIN uses artificially enhanced models that no longer bother to attempt realism. Ethnically ambiguous Brat-doll women with five-year-old waists, cartoonishly wide hips, dark beige skin, and features that have been cherry-picked from both Black and European faces flaunt bikinis that they have never worn. Because - as a reminder - they’re not real women. Nevertheless, having been valued as the largest fashion retailer in the world in 2022, SHEIN clearly doesn’t need real women to sell its clothes. Only the illusion of them.
In an uncanny kind of way, we saw this coming. Women especially. After all, in recent years, hasn’t society wanted us to be inhumanly hairless from the chin down, specifically curvaceous, and existing almost entirely with men in mind? We saw it too when Amazon released its first iteration of the home assistant, Alexa, who (before the men who created her retrained her following a barrage of complaints) would flirt back when you said something sexual towards her, and even take verbal abuse with good humour. It seems almost inevitable that AI would be chomping at the bit to play around with the concept of Woman, to begin to mould it into a more desirable shape.
It’s particularly unsettling to see all this happening in line with the rise of violence against women and girls which has soared by 40% in the UK, and has been declared a “national emergency” by the police. It’s impossible not to see how the two correlate. Little boys who demand subservience from their female home assistants and ogle AI models on the internet are naturally going to be surprised, disappointed, and even angry when real women and girls don’t live up to these inhuman expectations. And, in a much darker but entirely relevant way, women and girls are easier to assault, rape, and murder when you don’t see them as real human beings.
And if you think these boys must understand the difference between real and artificial women, I’d encourage you to look again at the endless social media attention these influencers receive on a daily basis from young people. Reality, for many, has left the chat.
But, sadly, the rise in artificial women is not always down to the work of men. The female-founded lifestyle publication, SheerLuxe, recently defended its decision to “hire” a new AI-generated Editor called Reem. On the surface, you might simply ask why a lifestyle publication needs an AI journalist when there are so many out there currently desperate for work. But a more pressing issue is why they decided to manufacture Reem as a woman of colour.
In 2022, data revealed that 88% of journalists or newspaper editors in the UK were white. So, rather than work to change those damning figures, it would seem that publications are happy to simply create the illusion of diversity to fill that void. One can’t help but wince over the fact that Reem has no authentic voice, only an amalgamation of the primarily white people who control her and feed her information. For all-white boardrooms, it’s the ultimate hire: a woman of colour who will never raise a complaint, challenge the status quo, or otherwise make a nuisance of herself.
In Spike Jonze’s now all-too-familiar movie Her, we watch as the character of Joaquin Phoenix falls slowly in love with his voice assistant, played by Scarlett Johansson. When it was released back in 2013 it felt credible, but somehow far off. It’s unsettling to see just how quickly such realities have found us—an ominous floorboard creak just outside our hiding place. Still, I’m less worried about the men who fall in love with artificial women, and far more worried about what happens to us - the real ones - as a result of their existence.
For more writing, poetry and pics, follow me on Instagram @alannaduffield
Hiring an AI-generated editor is wild enough, posing with them in a photograph is a level of delusion I could only aspire to
Didn't know about Reem. Good post. Loaded topic. Blade Runner 2049...the aptly named Joi. It's gonna get weirder.