On New Year’s Eve, like a true millennial, I decided to usher in the new year from the comfort of my bed, on social media. The plan was to watch fireworks clips uploaded by Nairobians who went to various spots for the anticipated colourful display. However, when I opened X, my timeline was instead awash with AI-generated pictures of women in tiny bikinis, clearly prompted by others, not the owners of the original photos.
I was surprised because when X’s AI bot Grok was fairly new, this same issue escalated to the point where it was reprogrammed to reject such prompts. Yet here we were again. This incident underscores the persistent challenge of AI-facilitated technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). I decided to return to TikTok for live fireworks displays, usher in the new year, then come back to fight the same tough battle on AI TFGBV that we spent the whole of last year addressing.
What Happened on X on New Year’s Eve
On this day, several X users were seen making very specific requests to the X-AI: “put her in a bikini”, “take her clothes off and replace with lingerie…” and a host of other highly charged prompts. Grok complied with all these non-consensual prompts and generated sexualised images of women and, in some instances, children. What shocked several other X users, and me, was the speed at which the images were being generated and circulated.
AI-TFGBV in Focus
When I spoke at the British High Commission Residency during the 16 Days of Activism commemoration, I highlighted that AI-facilitated TFGBV was one of the most pressing challenges for women in the digital space. Particularly, I spoke about AI offering a new avenue for more harmful content to be generated faster and distributed more widely. Working in Women’s Digital Rights, we expected this based on the trends we observed, but witnessing it unfold was still shocking.
The Rise of Nudifiers
Hundreds of AI sites and applications can now generate pornography from pictures of anyone. Programs that digitally undress women are called nudifiers, and they are not new. They have been around and, until now, have been confined to certain corners of the internet that require effort and payment to access. Thus, Grok, requiring only a command to undress and generate explicit content, has removed the barrier to access to nudifiers.
We have our work cut out for us now, and we will continue to track instances of AI-TFGBV on our tracker as well as innovate tools like multilingual Lexicons for better detection and WhatsApp bots like Mlinzi that quickly crowdsource instances of AI-generated TFGBV.