Racist and Misogynistic AI Spreading From 4chan to Mainstream Platforms [View all]

[Celerity]

A bigoted AI campaign on 4chan, and hosted on GitHub, is maliciously altering people’s bodies and appearance and receiving endorsements from extremists.

https://globalextremism.org/post/racist-and-misogynistic-ai-spreading-from-4chan-to-mainstream-platforms/



Warning: This analysis contains highly offensive and potentially triggering language and imagery.

Over the past week, “dignifAI” and “purifAI,” Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools originating from the /pol/ forum of 4chan, a website notorious for the promotion of extremist campaigns and hate speech, has spawned violent speech against women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community across social media. This activity is not to be ignored or dismissed as merely online talk. This is dangerous speech that has been known to lead to physical violence against women and other targets and will likely lead to more.

Generative AI, which is used to create text, images, or speech, has recently come under scrutiny for its role in spreading harmful disinformation, such as creating fake images of politicians during electoral campaigns, falsely implicating politicians in rigging elections, and opening the door for foreign interference in domestic politics. Recently, TikTok users were found to generate conspiracies using AI, many of which went viral, such as the United States government capturing mythical creatures and conducting research in secret cave systems, including one with almost two million views. But the potential harms of Generative AI don’t stop with the political space.

dignifAI fuelled by misogyny

On January 30, 2024, a 4chan user on /pol/, the “politically incorrect” forum, created a post titled “With the power of AI we can put clothes on women.” Mobilized by their sexist desire to show “nasty whores…what they could have been,” other users began to coordinate a larger harassment campaign to target women on the internet and alter their bodies and clothing using generative AI tools. DignifAI takes pictures of women wearing revealing clothing and “dresses” them, which users of the AI claim can “show [models] how much better they can be” through “brute force psychological warfare.” The far right, including incels, commonly view women having ownership over their own bodies as living a “degenerate lifestyle.” As a result, they’ve created a list of women across Twitter, Instagram, and OnlyFans for users to target for harassment.

A 4chan user posts an introduction to dignifAI purporting that models live a “degenerate lifestyle.” (Source: 4chan)

One user, who claimed to coin the name, said that dignifAI “understands female psychology” in that it demonstrates “the damage these whores did to themselves” which was a result of their failure to “find a strong masculine figure to force them to act with dignity.” Further, those taking part in this targeted harassment believe that men are needed to police women’s bodies and behaviors in order to deter them from “degeneracy.” AI has become a driving force to put this narrative into action.

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