AI 'GIRL': CHILD OR WOMAN?

Policy Watch SA explores what's meant by 'girl' in AI text-to-image art on international community platforms

Although the word 'girl' is widely understood to refer to a female child, in some countries it is used to describe a sexually attractive young adult female. In professional or other formal settings this may be considered disrespectful (Wikipedia)

The term 'pin-up girl' takes this a step further, referring to a young, sexually attractive female whose images are widely displayed for informal viewing (Wikipedia)

An Aesthetics Wiki (Fandom) article refers to pin-up art as "a form of empowerment celebrating confidence, beauty and ownership of one's sexuality". Apparently, "every girl has a pin-up selfie", reflecting "the evolution of pin-up culture from 20th century mass-produced imagery to modern, self-curated digital expression".

Which may be how (and why) innocent girl-next-door and girl-child images find themselves sharing the 'girl' page of a popular online AI text-to-image art generating platform with so many 'NSFW' portrayals of young women. Some examples of that can be found here, with a brief description of what is meant by the term 'NSFW'.

Although the online platform featuring those images offers members the option of seeing only safe/suitable-for-work (SFW) images, browsing its categorised pages for creative inspiration inevitably exposes more sensitive viewers to an avalanche of NSFW portrayals of young women that have slipped through the auto moderator net.

This is either because the creators of NSFW images choose not to label them NSFW and nobody reports them, or because the auto moderator failed to spot suspicious text-to-image prompts – or both. The text-to-image prompt for this image was 'sultry-seductive-voluptuous-redhead-temptress-with-flowing-hair', proving how easy it is to circumvent the blocking mechanism triggered by certain less subtle words such as 'boobs', 'breasts' and 'sexy'.

Of the 285 entries in an October 2025 'female portraits' competition hosted by one member of the same popular AI art platform, the top three were head-and-shoulder images of fully clothed women with sultry facial expressions. Most full-body images were sensual, with many displaying exaggerated décolletage. Several were later reviewed and relabelled.

Among less sensual portraits of women in the same competition, only three of the images below featured in the top 20. Among other things, this reflects a tendency for images of more conservatively clothed women (including women from other cultures) to fare poorly in challenges focusing on the female gender.