It started Rattling cages In my early teens at boarding school, decades later (not stopped) I was temporarily suspended from using an AI text-to-image community ‘art’ platform, prompting me to trawl the web for insights into the psychology of activism. The suspension followed months of complaints by community members to platform officials about the objectification and overreach of women.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, much of my free time was spent as a grassroots activist in the African townships/ghettos of Johannesburg. I am a natural white South African born in the UK. According to Shannon Goodow (Understanding Anti-Proliferation Activists in Apartheid South Africa), activism during these extraordinarily dangerous times was largely motivated by moral outrage and a “deep commitment to justice and human dignity”. This given “a system designed to dehumanize” people with birthday suits in different shades of grey. And – in challenging To the status quo – Personal safety and material interests are sacrificed for the greater good.
Which makes me a lot of money.
Since then, I’d like to believe that my activist streak has contributed positively to improving accountability between stakeholders in the UK home care industry (a long story I’d rather keep to myself) and to rooting out corruption in a large international ‘from-your-use-to-make-a-difference-in-afka’ Non-Governmental Organization (NOGO). There has been less victory at the local level.
For years, I’ve been trying to convince myself to look out for social injustices – of which there are many in South Africa to this day. Caregiving can be exhausting, and I’m no spring chicken. As an online journalist for the most part working from home on Parliament, focusing on producing insightful reports on public policy and legislation for paying clients – it’s relatively easy to blink at the outside world.
So, when I joined the AI ​​text-to-image community ‘art’ platform to create illustrations for work-related social media alerts, I expected to expose myself to so much female objectification. The rest is history – included in a series of articles published here, of which this is the eleventh.
As a relatively attractive woman, I know all about what some feminists say.Male gaze‘And can do well without being targeted, especially at work. But it happens, as most women know. It is in this context that I despise pornography, the legal aspects of which I find particularly troubling. And while I sympathize with women whose circumstances force them into sex work, I loathe men using their services. So, I guess I’m a bit of a purd by modern standards.
If anything, the AI ​​text-to-image community is feeding off the excess of women through the ‘art’ platform and both wonder and objectification industries—at least, it seems to me. Which cannot be in the public interest, surely? Something must be done! But by whom? As far as I can tell, Penny hasn’t dropped a line on women’s issue lobby groups and NGOs about the negative implications of AI art for their constituencies.
“Being an activist is about what you care about” (Greg Levy, Psychology Today) is “a byproduct, not a goal” and begins with “passion, not strategy.” In Levy’s view, “for some reason the more personal your connection—emotional, not intellectual—the more you’ll be motivated”—sentiments with which I wholeheartedly agree. I hated the dehumanization of African people under the apartheid regime in South Africa. And I hate seeing women objectify and objectify themselves on dehumanized and AI text-to-image community ‘art’ platforms. It’s as simple as that.