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A photo on Instagram with more reactions than normal and a message from a follower I didn’t know: “They took off your clothes with artificial intelligence (AI) and it’s everywhere.” After that, two feelings bubbled up: shame and anger. Johanna Villalobos, Costa Rican journalist and network content creator, had been talking for months on her podcast about the dangers of generative artificial intelligence and how it was “yet another weapon against women,” but she never thought she would be a victim of it. “I spent a week without leaving my house; I felt like everyone was looking at me because they knew. I felt a shame that is not mine. It is not my body, but it is hyperrealistic,” she says at her house in San José. The worst, however, came later: “Who do I report if it is impossible to know who it was and there are no laws for it? “I’m alone in this.”
The only way out that the 30-year-old found was to tell it on social networks and explain that it was not her real body. “I was the victim of a misogynistic attack on the internet, the fake porn or fake porn […]. I had days of anxiety, fear around my professional career, I felt ashamed and humiliated for something that was not even my fault,” she explained in a video. But the result was merely cathartic. Although days later more than a hundred women in Costa Rica, Mexico and Colombia, among other countries, regretted similar situations, the complaints have no place in a court.
Mexico has been one of the countries most concerned with violence against women online and has a large package of federal and state reforms to sanction these practices, known as the Olympia Law, but AI and the difficult traceability of the author maintain this behavior in a gray area. Argentina, inspired by Mexican regulations and with a current Olympia Law, is one of the countries in the region that is closest to achieving change. Currently, the Belén Law project is under discussion. The text would make it possible to punish the obtaining, extortion and non-consensual dissemination of intimate material or that portrays sexual violence or sexual violence practices. deep fake porn. Meanwhile, Colombia has one of the least guaranteeing legislations on the continent in this matter. Next to Nicaragua and Venezuela, online gender violence is not included in any legal framework. In Chile, the focus of the measures is only on minors.
Attempts to typify and raise awareness about it are arriving late, in the countries where it at least reaches. “We are going towards a Me Too of this type of crimes,” predicts Cecilia Celeste Danesi, researcher and author of The empire of algorithms. “There is a very strong activism movement in Latin America because I believe that society has not yet understood the dimension of this tool on women, girls and adolescents.” According to the research of Home Security Heroes, which studied almost 96,000 videos created with generative AI, 98% of them are pornographic and take no more than 25 minutes to create a hyper-realistic one-minute video. 74% of the creators of this content say they have no regrets.
That question has been on Villalobos’ mind for months. “I don’t understand what the person who did it gains. Not even if he is aware of the damage he has caused me,” explains the young woman. On networks, however, her comments reflect machismo and the objectification of women on the continent. “Everyone told me that it was a strategy of mine to earn more money or to become famous. “Who would think that this would benefit me?,” she criticizes. “I asked each person who spoke to me about the case: ‘Did you see it?’ It is horrible that she relates to this and not to my work.” That is why, for Danesi, the key is awareness, regulation and, above all, education and public policies to “understand the dimension” of the scenario that is beginning to emerge.
A television presenter in Costa Rica, the singer Rosalía, the students of the Higher School of Commerce and Administration in Mexico City, the Mexican legislator whose fake photos ended up on Only Fans… No woman currently has the tools to protect herself from these attacks cybernetics, 99% directed at them. To us.
For Danesi, there are two avenues of regulation. The first is to follow European standards, which establish transparency obligations for applications—such as introducing watermarks on fictitious content—and limiting social networks. “That’s where they go viral and where they cause the most pain for women,” she adds. The second way is to protect these rights collaterally. “We have to talk about how to restrict any broadcast platform.” That is, find tools that locate fictitious content and use algorithms so that they do not spread like wildfire and not the other way around, which is what happens to women. Also to Villalobos. The first screenshot she received as proof was the image of two WhatsApp and Telegram groups, with about 1,800 users in each one. Then, dozens of calls that had seen it on other networks. Until he stopped asking. “I just want to forget it,” she says.
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And a suggestion to finish:
💜 🇩🇴 A woman whose memory has just been rescued:
Today we want to use this space to honor Abigail Mejia (1895-1941), one of those pioneers who paved the way for the rights of others, but whose name was not as recognized at the time due to her gender. In addition to being one of those women ahead of her time who stood out in different fields, from writing, photography or education and having directed the National Museum, Abigail Mejía founded two feminist organizations, Club Nosotras and Acción Feminista Dominicana, which aimed to train and educate women, especially the poorest in the country. In 1931, she wrote her first feminist manifesto in which she called for equality between men and women and demanded the right to women’s suffrage. Furthermore, in various writings published in the press she denounced the sexism of Dominican society. Mejía died in 1941, a year before Dominican women could vote.
This September 28, his remains were transferred to the Pantheon of the Homeland in a ceremony in which President Luis Abinader participated. For the Minister of Women, Mayra Jiménez, it is “one more step towards recognizing the contribution of women to the construction of the Republic and an invitation to continue delving into history from a perspective of equality and gender equity, which “Remove the extraordinary Dominican women from anonymity.” With Mejía, there are now seven women recognized in the Dominican National Pantheon.
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#Naked #felt #shame