<nettime> New project by Paolo Cirio: Stop AI Nudify

[Geert Lovink via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

New project by Paolo Cirio:
https://stop-ai-nudify.org/
https://paolocirio.net/work/nudify/

The italian artist Paolo Cirio found evidence of abuse on Grok.com by collecting a sample of around 15 thousand AI-generated images and then using AI to detect photorealistic visuals that sexualized women, children, politicians, celebrities, and vulnerable individuals without consent. This sample is only a small portion of the images generated in total and of those still stored on Grok.com and reposted on X.com. 

Cirio’s investigation involved forensic analysis of the metadata, sources, visuals, and contexts of these images, uncovering evidence of generative AI abuse that circulates online and harms citizens. The findings of Cirio’s investigation will be shared with organizations to support regulatory action, remove non-consensual AI content, and help victims to seek justice against Elon Musk.

Cirio published some of the evidence found by AI on his project's website STOP-AI-NUDIFY.org. To preserve the subjects’ privacy, faces or identifiable details in the images are excluded, as well as any linked data. In addition, a visual effect applied to minimize the sexualization and instead emphasize the hallucinated, technical, and violent nature of artificial intelligence. 

The resulting work is a visual database of thousands of details of AI-generated images browsable by keywords related to body parts, flesh, fluids, gestures, clothes, and objects that can include controversial content. In the database there is evidence of non-consensual visuals, revealing the scale of abuse and how to mitigate it. 

Ultimately, Cirio assembled a list of accusations about issues that remain unsolved regarding the abuse of Grok.com and X.com, and broadly on nudify AI capabilities. Cirio’s project also advocates for regulation, independent moderation, and broader implementation of AI filters to limit exposure to AI abuse.

As our bodies are recreated by AI to become subjects of violence, these images are about inflicting abuse on our physical bodies. The Nudify project aims to undress AI by stripping away its power and revealing its bare political use against society. In a sense, this project nudifies AI, revealing its blatant process of nudifying humans, which is also a blatant form of violence in itself. Cirio addresses this violence as a media phenomenon and sociopolitical issue in his essay Generative AI-Violence, which was commissioned for the project Soft Photography by ECAL school in Lausanne.

AI can find evidence of abuse generated by AI. “AI Machine Vision” is used to detect abuse by “AI Envision Machine”, a term coined by Paolo Cirio for this project and his essay. Artificial intelligence improves the ability to find evidence just as much as it can falsify it. The notions of fabrication, manipulation, and deepfakes in photography can be reframed as a new set of notions around the return of photography as a truth-finding practice. Counterintuitively, with generative AI, evidence in photography returns to the foreground. These fake photos are not just merely evidence of falsification; they are direct evidence of abuse and crime. Truth returns through exposing falsification and revealing what it does to individuals and society.

AI must be stripped of its power, showing the king naked. This project aims to literally nudify AI. Analyzing AI-generated images also unveils how such imagery is produced. For AI, this process is a mere technical and mathematical assemblage of pixels, bits of images, and visual language; the controversial, abusive, and offensive content is just a well-calculated composition. In fact, by reassembling AI-generated images, the collages in this project also reveal the technical banality of the process.

Seeing as AI is like looking at an abstract field of color gradients, with expected shapes assembled from samples of other images. However, AI models lack the context to understand the social threats they pose to individuals or the complex personal and political intentions behind them. Therefore, AI-generated depictions become the flattest representations of what humans can ever make of themselves.

And yet, it’s not only about AI. It is the underlying wider cultural context concerning gender and social discrimination, lack of education, corporate greed, bad politics that shape legislation, and general misunderstanding of the complex layers that really generate such violence.


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