New AI Trend Emphasizes Modesty, Tradition
Modern culture embraces a host of behaviors and lifestyles — from scantily clad celebrities to obscene facial tattoos — that would have drawn full-throated denunciations by society not so long ago.
With the age of artificial intelligence only feeding that depravity, one recent trend aims to use the technology as a way to recapture the traditions of decades past.
Using the hashtag #DignifAI, social media users have been sharing their AI-generated images of individuals edited to reflect a more modest or conservative appearance. The trend appears to be a direct response to the use of AI to create sensational and adult-themed images of entertainers like Taylor Swift as well as ordinary people who did not consent to such use of their likeness.
Some of the celebrities who received the #DignifAI treatment include singer Miley Cyrus, whose skimpy Grammy attire was revised to provide more coverage, and transgender actor Elliot Page, whose photo was revamped to reflect a feminine appearance.
Several tattoo-covered entertainers were given a more clean-cut image and even billionaire Elon Musk was given an AI makeover in a post that was shared to the social media platform that he owns.
While many of the examples involved adding clothing to people, primarily women, pictured in various stages of undress, others sought to hearken the traditional family, such as one image that added a baby into the arms of a woman who was flashing a vulgar hand gesture in the original photo.
As one user on the website 4chan, where the trend reportedly originated, responded to one #DignifAI photo: “Something about this image is really deep. It’s like a visual synthesis of all that has been lost — a meme in the truest, original sense of the word.”
Meanwhile, so-called “deepfake” AI-generated images have been used to create compromising images of unsuspecting victims, including a group of teen students at a New Jersey high school.
The mother of one girl called for action, asserting: “We’re fighting for our children. They are not Republicans and they are not Democrats. They don’t care. They just want to be loved and they want to be safe.”
