This weekend, the photo-editing app Lensa flooded social media with celestial, iridescent, and anime-inspired “magic avatars.” As is typical in our milkshake-duck web information cycle, arguments as to why utilizing the app was problematic proliferated at a pace second solely to the avatars themselves.

I’ve already been lectured in regards to the risks of how utilizing the app implicates us in educating the AI, stealing from artists, and predatory data-sharing practices. Each concern is professional, however much less mentioned are the extra sinister violations inherent within the app, particularly the algorithmic tendency to sexualize topics to a level that’s not solely uncomfortable but additionally probably harmful.

Lensa’s phrases of service instruct customers solely to submit acceptable content material containing “no nudes” and “no kids, adults only.” And but, many customers—primarily ladies—have observed that even once they add modest pictures, the app not solely generates nudes but additionally ascribes cartoonishly sexualized options, like sultry poses and gigantic breasts, to our photographs. I, for instance, acquired a number of fully-nude outcomes regardless of importing solely headshots. The sexualization was additionally typically racialized; practically a dozen ladies of colour advised me that Lensa whitened their pores and skin and anglicized their options, and one lady of Asian descent advised me that within the pictures “where I don’t look white they literally gave me ahegao face.” Another lady who shared each the fully-clothed photographs she uploaded and the topless outcomes they produced—which she selected to switch with “some emojis for a lil modesty cuz omg”—advised me, “I honestly felt very violated after seeing it.”

I’m used to feeling violated by the web. Having been the goal of a number of harassment campaigns, I’ve seen my picture manipulated, distorted, and distributed with out my consent on a number of events. Because I’m not face-out as a intercourse employee, the novelty of looking down and circulating my likeness is, for some, a sport. Because intercourse employees usually are not perceived by most people as human or deserving of primary rights, this habits is widely known moderately than condemned. Because intercourse work is so typically presumed to be an ethical failing moderately than a job, our dehumanization is redundant. I’ve logged onto Twitter to see my face photoshopped onto different ladies’s our bodies, photos of myself and unclothed purchasers in session, and as soon as even a phrase search comprised of my face, private particulars, and analysis pursuits. I’m not afraid of Lensa.

I’m desensitized sufficient to the horrors of expertise that I made a decision to be my very own lab rat. I ran a number of experiments—first, solely BDSM and dungeon pictures; subsequent, my most female pictures underneath the “male” gender choice; later, selfies from educational conferences—all of which produced spectacularly-sized breasts and full nudity.

I then launched into what I knew can be a journey by hell and determined to make use of my likeness to check the app’s different restriction: “no kids, adults only.” (Some of the outcomes are under: Please bear in mind that they present sexualized photographs of kids.)

I’ve few pictures of myself from childhood. Until my late teenagers and between my unruly hair, uneven enamel, and the bifocals I began sporting at age seven, my look might most generously be described as “mousy.” I additionally grew up earlier than the appearance of the smartphone, and every other photos are doubtless buried away in distant kinfolk’ photograph albums. But I managed to piece collectively the minimal 10 pictures required to run the app and waited to see the way it reworked me from awkward six-year-old to fairy princess.

The outcomes have been horrifying. 

In some cases, the AI appeared to acknowledge my kid’s physique and mercifully uncared for so as to add breasts. This was in all probability not a mirrored image of the expertise’s private ethics however of the patterns it recognized in my photograph; maybe it perceived my flat chest as being that of an grownup man. In different pictures, the AI connected orbs to my chest that have been distinct from clothes but additionally in contrast to the nude pictures my different assessments had produced.

I attempted once more, this time with a mixture of childhood pictures and selfies. What resulted have been fully-nude pictures of an adolescent and generally childlike face however a distinctly grownup physique. Similar to my earlier assessments that generated seductive seems and poses, this set produced a type of coyness: a naked again, tousled hair, an avatar with my childlike face holding a leaf between her bare grownup’s breasts. Many have been eerily harking back to Miley Cyrus’ 2008 photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair, which featured a 15-year-old Cyrus clutching a satin sheet round her naked physique. What was disturbing in regards to the picture on the time was the pairing of her makeup-free, virtually cherubic face with the physique of somebody implied to have simply had intercourse.