The fight for body positivity is nothing new, and can be traced all the way back to the 1960s when Black American activists began fighting for the right to feel comfortable in the skin they were in.
This movement has undergone a lot of paradigm shifts and has dealt with emerging trends and changing waves in the cultural perception of the perfect body for decades. But whether or not the body positivity movement is ready for the invention of AI and tools like Portrait Pal is another question altogether.
How did the body positivity movement start?
The body positivity movement started in 1969 with Bill Fabrey, who was outraged at the way his wife Joyce was treated for being a fat woman. He started an association called the National Association to Aid Fat Americans, which still exists today under the name National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance or NAAFA.
This organisation aimed to call out the discrimination faced by fat people all across America. For example, Cornell University had a policy against admitting fat students on the basis that they would struggle to walk up the hills surrounding the university.
Other members of the association also found discrimination rampant in their society. Many members had been turned down for jobs because of their weight regardless of their qualifications, experience, or suitability for the role, which was often explained as because of the health insurance policies.
In 1973, a group of feminists from California released the Fat Manifesto, which continued to call out this discrimination. During this time, the predominant voices being heard were white, although the majority of the discrimination being faced was from marginalised communities.
In later decades, the Black and Brown voices began to be heard and a new description for the movement was selected: body positivity. Early Black and Brown creators used their platforms to spread the message of fat visibility, and to remove the stereotype that all fat people are unhealthy. Women of colour and queer people were particularly important during this time as they were the main voices leading the way through the body positivity movement.
They invited a whole new generation of people to enjoy their skins and to remove social stigma surrounding being fat.
However, in recent years, the body positivity movement has begun to struggle again because of an overwhelming negative response from certain demographics of the population and with the invention of social media, which has made comparing oneself to idealised versions of other people the norm.
How do teenagers now feel about body positivity?
With the invention of social media, a whole new wave of body image issues began arising. Mental health became an immediate issue for most children coming of age in the new generation, and this is a trend that has continued as our youth get brought up with access to social media from a young age.
Teenagers in this day and age are aware of the dangers of social media and aware that they can’t all have the same body type, or the body type that’s seen as ‘best’ on whatever trend is making its way around at that moment.
However, this doesn’t stop the negative effects of social media from occurring, with a large number of teenagers readily admitting that having access to social media has negatively affected their mental health and body image.
The main issues that seem to present to teens are the comparisons to others in their age group. Those with body types that are not considered ideal, yet who do the same things that others who do have stereotypically ideal body types, like exercising and eating well, can develop a negative body image.
Although teens are actively trying not to compare themselves to others on social media, the swarm of influencers showing off fad diets or juice cleanses that will get you guaranteed results causes the teens to feel as though engaging in these unhealthy behaviours will be worth it if they get the promised results.
This has become even more complicated in recent years because bodies online can be so easily manipulated with photo editing tools, which makes the ideal body type not only something that is unreasonable, but something that is literally impossible to achieve.
How can AI have an impact?
Artificial intelligence is a new technology and there need to be extremely careful regulations for how it’s used in social media and online. Although AI is extremely useful in many cases, it could cause a huge backwards slide if not dealt with correctly.
AI image generators are just beginning to come onto the scene. Many of these image generators are used for work purposes, like Portrait Pal, which uses actual images that the person uploads to the app to create high quality headshots that can be used for office work, added to resumes, or used in acting and fashion industries.
These AI image generators should cause no real issues for our teens, as it’s unlikely that they’ll be using them. However, AI technologies can also be used to influence the cultural and social environment through inclusion in ad campaigns, like by creating models that are used to sell clothing in the fashion industry.
Some AI tools like Deep Agency have already come under fire for a lack of diversity and a lack of inclusion of body positive body types in their AI models. This tool made it impossible to generate models of a certain size or to generate models wearing clothing that crossed traditional gender boundaries.
If AI models are increasingly used to replace traditional models, it will be extremely important that those AI models can still hold up to the diverse and body positive models that we have made headway with in the fashion industry so far.
Moreover, with each AI-generated model that exists, the real life model is missing out on the opportunity to gain revenue from work. This is especially problematic for models who are already marginalised, like Black or body diverse models.
The bodies that young people see on a day to day basis, and those that are advertised to them, have been shown to have a significant impact on their mental health. It should be of the utmost importance to ensure that any AI used is as diverse and body positive as traditional modelling to reduce the potential for negative impacts on the body positivity movement.
