Latent: (of a quality or state) existing but not yet developed or manifest; hidden or concealed: […] late Middle English: from Latin latent- ‘being hidden’, from the verb latere.
When I first started using a Stable Diffusion plugin in Photoshop, I was frustrated by the fact that so much of my feminist theory ‘prompting’ was rejected, which meant out of focus images. I knew at the time I should be saving those out of focus renders, but only saved a few. One of them has ended up being the front page of my website and has a page to itself in the lamellae.org website. I wondered if the technology was still being quite so puritanical this morning and asked the plugin to create a few more images (I usually use RunwayML nowadays). I’m not the only one to notice this trend, and Arway Mahdawi asks similar questions in a column earlier this year.
Is the word ‘placenta’ pornographic?
Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian, 25/02/23
The popular AI image generator Midjourney seems to think so. MIT Technology Review has discovered that it bans a lot of words relating to the human reproductive system as prompts. Naughty words include: “urethra”, “cervix”, “hymen” and “sperm”. While some terms relate to the male reproductive system, the bans “skew predominantly female … demonstrat[ing] how the tendency for AI systems to sexualize women extends all the way to their internal organs.
