Last week, the Princess of Wales released the latest of her quarterly videos. Lots of slightly soft-focus visuals of HRH walking through the countryside like a House of Bruar model while a slow, serious, pause-filled voiceover gave us her thoughts about winter. Taken with her recent refusal to give details about her clothes, the videos suggest that Kate is keen to carve out a more serious role for herself. No longer a clotheshorse, but a thinker of worthy thoughts.
You may agree with her or you may find her offerings banal and trite, attracting attention not because of what is said, but only because of who said it. That is your right. No one, not even a princess, has a right to force you to think of them as they wish.
This is not a new principle. Few eminent Athenians probably wanted to appear as they did in Aristophanes’ plays, and Egnatius the Spaniard, who left no other mark on history, would probably not have been overjoyed to learn that his name lives on solely because the poet Catullus told his readers that he drank urine. They did not, however, get a choice. Similarly, the whole point of cartooning through the ages has been to present the subject in the most unflattering possible light.
Shortly after the Princess’s video, it emerged that X’s AI, Grok, was creating images for users in various states of undress and doing the sorts of things not mentioned in family websites. Cue outrage and more pictures of Keir Starmer in a bikini than any country reasonably needs. Grok, it soon emerged, was not the only AI that would perform this service for its users. Despite the fact that the company restricted the facility to paying customers (who can be identified through their credit cards) and none of the other models have taken similar action, X has been referred to Ofcom and there is talk of the entire platform, not just the AI model, being banned in Britain. The Britain which is the subject of Lord Hannan’s book How We Invented Freedom… “Nudification” apps are now to be outlawed.
There has been little outcry about this beyond the country’s four libertarians. The freedom-loving yeoman of Lord Hannan’s book has long disappeared, if he ever existed in the first place. Covid revealed a country with rather more petty authoritarians than stout-hearted defenders of liberty. It seems to be, to most, clear that one should not be able to make images of others which they find uncongenial.
For this is the issue which underlies the current hullabaloo. People are using technology to portray others in ways to which they have not consented, the implication being that one has an absolute right to control how one is portrayed by others. If Keir Starmer does not wish to be depicted in a bikini, then no one can depict him in a bikini.
As a general principle, this quickly gets us to an uncomfortable place. Ed Miliband famously looked awkward eating a bacon sandwich. Politicians generally prefer not to look awkward. If he had a right to control how he appeared, he could presumably demand that the image was permanently destroyed. If Orwellian is an over-used word, this would still be an appropriate time to deploy it.
Miliband is a public figure and he did eat a bacon sandwich, so his case may not map perfectly to a private individual being depicted doing something they did not do, i.e. to cases where the event portrayed is an act of imagination, rather than a record of fact. To make such an image and pass it off as real would be fraudulent and potentially libellous. But both are covered by existing law. Is the act of making such an image, in itself, wrong?
Why would it be? Yes, the subjects of the images have not consented, but, as we have seen, that has never been a sufficient reason for banning expression. It will cause further, real-world, harm. There is little evidence for this from the creation of an image alone. We are so keen to believe that a slightly bad thing must always be a gateway to a very bad thing that we forget that it can often be a substitute—the number of vapers who become smokers is almost certainly lower than the number of smokers who become vapers.
We tend to believe that banning the expression of a feeling inherently leads to the extinction of that feeling but this, of course, is wrong. Stopping people from chanting “Globalise the Intifada” does not automatically consign antisemitism to history’s rubbish bin. Even if we stop people from portraying other people naked, that will not stop them imagining other people naked.
There is a certain irony about the present controversy arising from an AI associated with a social media site because it is that technology which has done so much to allow us to curate our images. Countless hours are spent primping, preening and posing so our contacts have no choice but to believe we are what we want them to think we are. We post photos of glamourous drinks parties, not photos of the mornings after glamourous drinks parties. We post videos of beautiful beaches, not charter flights full of stag parties at 6am. We laud our successes; we elide our failures.
It is this which underlies much of the current problem. People are using technology to portray others in ways they do not think of themselves, and would prefer others not to do so either. Thoughts we can skate over, ignore, pretend they do not exist but pictures of us wearing that. Doing that. With them? Why do they think of us like that? That’s not the image we project. That’s not who we think we are and it’s certainly not how we want anyone else to think we are.
As in so many things, there is a hypocrisy here. We are quite happy to reduce others to mere images in the daydreams we spend so much of our time enjoying. The relationship you ponder about with the person you see every day on the commute, they did not consent to being your plaything. Germany’s goalkeeper does not consent to be seen on his knees sobbing after fantasy you has scored the penalty that wins the World Cup. Keir Starmer did not consent to lose an election so you could roll out your 10-point-plan for a better country on the Downing Street steps in your head for the nth time. None of this stops us, of course.
Power and wealth, it is said, do not change one’s character, they reveal it. At scale, the internet does the same for humanity. We are tribal, status-seeking, sex-obsessed hairless monkeys. And we really don’t like to be reminded of the fact. It is what we are, though, and what we will remain, no matter how much we might try to ban the evidence.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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No skin in the game here, I don’t use X or have a clue how I’d use Grok but in general oppose banning anything that’s been legal but then suddenly isn’t anymore and question why.
Isn’t it though all part of the plan though that AI (still only a fancy Google+) will create things that bring doubt as to whether they are real or not? Some probably will think Starmer in a bikini (yuk) is real, the type of people who fall for Internet romance or lottery scams presumably.