New Study Examines Features and Policies for 29 AI ‘Undressing’ Apps
With advances in generative AI over the last few years, many harms have become apparent, from the environmental impact of model training to disinformation to job losses. One of the most tangible and widespread negative impacts has been the proliferation of undressing (or “nudify”) apps, which enable unskilled users to generate non-consensual intimate images (NCII) of victims rapidly, cheaply, and often with just one photo of the subject’s face.
A new study published in the journal Violence Against Women by Kaylee Williams, a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School and an occasional contributor to Tech Policy Press, examines a set of these apps through the lens of tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), deriving data with which to place the phenomenon in its sociological context, and specifically how they “contribute to broader dynamics of gendered power.”
Williams’s study began with identifying a set of apps to study. From an initial 101 candidates, she eliminated those that were defunct, duplicates, in Russian, or did not appear to “primarily exist for the creation of NCII.” Following ethical best practices and legal risk mitigations, those that did not require users or subjects to be over the age of majority were also removed. (The use of undressing apps by and using images of minors is a subject of great importance, but necessarily was not the focus of this paper.) 29 apps remained in the set for content analysis.
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