DANGER ZONE: THE AI TEXT-TO-IMAGE-ANIME-ART MIX (first published in ‘Medium’)

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AI text-to-image anime 'girls' are often over-sexualised and portrayed with exaggerated body parts

Anime began in 1910 as a Japanese form of animated film with storylines and characters (Wikipedia). Since then, the portrayal of women in various genres of anime art has evolved from “stereotypical roles” to “more complex and empowered characters” (DPirates). Initially reflecting “traditional Japanese societal norms”, until the 1980s anime narratives tended to portray female characters as “passive, domestic figures” in secondary, support roles. Today’s “strong female protagonist” evolved from an array of “independent heroines” that emerged during the 1980s and has since been taken to dizzying heights.

The downside is that some genres of anime art tend to the sexualise and objectify their female characters — depicting them in “revealing outfits” and “suggestive situations”. AI text-to-image art generating apps appear to be compounding that problem by allowing the creator of an anime image to skip the complex and often tedious process of developing animated film — focusing instead on providing a “fan service”, which is the term used to describe images intended to meet specific viewer/audience expectations (Wikipedia).

This is often a feature of the type of anime woman generated on AI text-to-image community art platforms. By focusing on ‘followers’, ‘likes’ and competition, these communities appear to have created a demand for anime females with childish faces and volumptuous over-sexualised bodies in suggestive poses.

For some time, the terms ‘fictosexuality’, ‘fictoromance’ and ‘fictophilia’ have been used in “online environments” to describe “strong and lasting feelings of love, infatuation or desire for one or more fictional characters” (PubMed Central). Similar to “celebrity worship” (a “parasocial” relationship with someone real), attachments to fantasy figures may nevertheless have as much — if not more — potential to “turn pathological” as celebrity worship. When that happens, the “objective conception of reality” is disrupted. This may have worrying implications for sexual development among the largest group of anime art consumers: children.

So, what’s being done to mitigate the potential damage anime characters apparently have the capacity to inflict on the minds of young, impressionable AI text-to-image app users? Not much, apparently. They’re money spinners. Why should anyone care about the long-term effect they may eventually have on real life relationships and the real world in general?

Scary, scary, scary …