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In a beauty feature for Dazed magazine published on January 17th 2024, model Nassia Matsa describes her experience of sitting on the tube on the way to a casting, when she glances up and sees an advertisement for an insurance company and notices the model in the ad looks extraordinarily similar to her. Matsa ultimately realises that the company in question is using AI-generated models and has stolen her image alongside those of other models she has worked with, in the industry. At the end of the article, Matsa quotes her agent reassuring her that AI-generated imagery won’t impact her line of work, as there will always be a need for real-life human models on the runway which the audience can aspire to.
That said, on a day-to-day basis, there are more people who glance at advertisements on the tube than those in attendance at runway shows. Matsa’s experience goes beyond the field of high fashion and advertising; not all women are models, but everyone has a body and a life in which technology has become totally enmeshed. Young women represent one of the key demographics who are the most engaged with online culture and the construction of the online self. The vulnerabilities of Matsa’s image are therefore not exclusive to the realm of models and celebrities, as we are all learning to handle digitised versions of ourselves.
Over the last few decades, the exchange of ideas within arts, media and culture has remodelled prevailing beliefs around socially liberal values, tastes, political priorities and interests. We see this reflected in Western feminism, the recent messaging of which has fundamentally centred on self-definition and personal freedom, even if this can usually just be prioritised and afforded by privileged, young, educated, members of the cultural elite who exported those values in the first place.
Matsa’s experience spotlights a beautiful, successful model who has had her image stolen, transformed and used in an advertisement that she has had no hand in helping create. Not only is her career and means of livelihood threatened, but the self-ownership she had over her physical image has been compromised. A semblance of personal freedom is difficult to grasp within this story as the relationship between technological progress and feminist advancement seems to be deteriorating. Predominantly male powers have continued to create and employ technology with capabilities which outclass our own; Matsa’s story is trepidatious because there is no clear way to adjust to a world where the possibilities include your physical likeness being despoiled and autogenerated regardless of your consent.
Every day we are mitigating the benefits and trade-offs of previous technology and our immersion in the rapidly expanding digital world increasingly draws attention towards how its capabilities outperform our own. Since our embodied realities are partly determined by sex, a dialectic is being created between technological advancement and the definitions of personal freedom and identity in the modern era.
The care applied to answering the question of who owns Matsa’s image provides an estimation of the cultural concern about the ownership we think every woman deserves over her body. How will loyalty continue to be paid towards female self-ownership if it means re-evaluating the current cultural and political conditions under which the digitised body is evolving? I’ll reiterate that the subheading for Matsa’s article reads that “models are discovering they don’t have the rights to their own bodies” and it was published as a beauty feature.
Female bodies are the early casualties of tech progressivism and this reality is being swept under the carpet as tales of internet spectacle and beauty features. There will be plenty of women whose lives are being arbitrated by technology which only serves the corporate and personal freedoms of a lucky few— whilst mainstream feminist discourse has focused on the surface-level topics of outrage culture and empowerment marketing, the far-reaching issues presented by technological advancement are in fast emergence.
Image: J.Barande for Ecole polytechnique and Institut Polytechnique de Paris// CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
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