Dove Pledges to Never Use AI to Represent Human Bodies

(TotalConservative.com) – Dove, maker of soaps and other beauty products, announced a new initiative on April 9 to avoid using AI-generated images of women’s bodies in its advertising. The brand has been known for decades to showcase real women and unaltered photographs to create more realistic beauty standards in the culture.

The announcement on Tuesday said that they’ll never deploy AI-generated images as stand-ins for real bodies. The company said that they will use AI-generated images with more refined prompts to show how users can generate more realistic looking women with the new technology.

While most brands have already begun to employ AI in their marketing or communications, Dove’s approach is unique. The shampoo, soap, and deodorant brand is one of the first major companies to suggest that AI could be harmful and needs to be improved over time.

AnswerConnect is a customer service provider who previously promised to never use AI instead of real people to answer questions online or over the phone. Some companies are developing software that can detect and watermark images that were generated with AI so that users can’t be easily misled.

The announcement came with a “playbook” from the company that gave AI tools some prompt adjustments that would allow users to get more diverse and realistic images of women. They then featured the images that were generated using the suggestions and labeled them clearly as AI-generated images.

Dove has been interested in women’s perceptions of their own beauty going back as far as 2004, when they began to feature unedited pictures of women whose bodies they believed were underrepresented in media at the time. The move was one of the first strides in the body positivity movement.

Recently, Dove surveyed more than 33,000 people across 20 countries finding that nearly a third replied that they altered their appearance based on content they saw online, without knowing whether or not it was AI-generated, photoshopped, or a real unedited image. The initiative is aimed at helping people make more informed choices about media they are consuming online.