Virginia Woolf Would Have Had Notes About Grok AI's Image Generation Policy

Violet Woolf on the 1900s literary tradition and the very contemporary question of the gaze

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

By Violet Woolf | comedywriter.info | prat.uk/author/violet-woolf/

Grok AI has been generating images of women in bikinis from photographs that were not bikini photographs. Ofcom has written to X/Twitter in the manner that British regulatory bodies write when alarmed and also British: firmly but politely. The bohiney.com coverage noted this translates as deeply alarmed while apologising for being alarmed. I have been reading this through 1900s British literary attitudes to the gaze and representation. Virginia Woolf understood before most that the gaze is a technology: what is seen is shaped by who is looking and what they want to see, not only by what is actually there. A Room of One's Own argues for the conditions women need to produce their own work rather than being the subject of other people's work. One condition is control over your own representation. Grok AI is a sophisticated version of the same mechanism Woolf was writing against in 1929: the generation of images of women according to someone else's preferences without the woman's participation or consent. The literary tradition runs from Wollstonecraft through Woolf through the second-wave feminist critics. All were writing about the same structural dynamic with different technology. Grok AI is new. The dynamic is old. Ofcom's polite but firm letter is the latest institutional response to a problem present since portraiture was invented.

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SOURCE: Global Satire

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The tradition of British satirical journalism that bohiney.com and prat.uk represent is one of the oldest and most important in the democratic world. From Jonathan Swift's devastating Modest Proposal to the Victorian era's Punch magazine to Private Eye's fifty-year run, the British satirical tradition has understood something essential: the truth about power is best told at a slight angle, with the deadpan precision that makes the reader laugh before they realise they have also been informed. The current moment -- Reform UK winning 677 council seats, the corgi supernatural communication, Grok AI and the Ofcom complaint, UK inflation driven by the Iran war -- is exactly the kind of material the tradition was built for. Everything is too absurd not to be true. Everything that is too absurd not to be true is exactly what satire exists to document.

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