Users on 4chan’s far-right “politically incorrect” message board (commonly known as “/pol/”) have launched a misogynistic campaign advocating for the use of AI to “put clothes on women.” The campaign, called “#dignifAI,” has spread widely since it started in late January, including getting attention from major far-right figures and making its way to other platforms.
On January 30, a 4chan user posted a thread saying that “with the power of AI we can put clothes on women” and showing two images: one that appears to be an Instagram post of a woman and then the same post but with more clothing on the woman. The user added, “AI porn makes them angry. But use AI to clothe them, remove their tattoos and piercings.. The seething will echo through the ages.”
Fellow users expressed enthusiasm about the idea and voted on a campaign name, ultimately landing on “#dignifAI.”
The user that started the January 30 thread also claimed that it would be “memetic perfection” and likened it to the 4chan campaigns “Islam is right about women” and “IOKTBW” (it’s OK to be white).
Numerous threads titled “#dignifAI” and including similar imagery have since racked up hundreds of posts each. According to a Media Matters internal search, as of publication there have been more than 1,200 posts with the “dignifAI” term on “/pol/” since the campaign began, along with nearly 100 individual threads apparently dedicated to the campaign.
Users promoting the campaign on 4chan have said that the aim of #dignifAI is “for people to see that a degenerate lifestyle is ultimately fruitless.” They also called for users to “repost with #dignifAI hashtag on social media” and to harass the women the campaign is targeting by “INCLUD[ING] NAME OF THE THOT IN THE POST SO ANONS CAN @ THEM.”
The threads appear to call for users to specifically use the AI tool Stable Diffusion for creating the images, even though that tool’s terms of service prohibit its use “for any illegal, harmful, or unauthorized purposes. 404 Media noted that the images seem to be edited with other tools such as Photoshop, rather than created with AI tools. (There is even a website dedicated to the campaign.)
Users have also apparently been collecting a file of images created in the campaign, with one user claiming over 1,000 images have been collected.
Some major far-right media figures have boosted the campaign on other platforms, including “Pizzagate” promoter Jack Posobiec and Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson.
On February 2, Posobiec posted on X (formerly Twitter), “4chan has launched a new AI tool. Its purpose is to put clothes back on e-girls and remove tattoos. It is called dignifAI,” which got thousands of reposts.
Watson posted a YouTube video on the same day, hyping 4chan’s campaign as “a force for good” and getting over 100,000 views.
Right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong also posted that same day, “When given pictures of thirst traps, AI imagines what could’ve been if they’d been raised by strong fathers,” along with an image of an adult content creator and another in which she’s more covered up, skinnier, and surrounded by children. This post has gotten millions of views, according to X’s view count. (The content creator rebuked the images in an X post to Cheong and in interviews with NBC News and Rolling Stone.)
4chan’s campaign was also promoted by the right-wing outlet Revolver News, which claimed that “a group known as ‘4chan’ has come up with an intriguing strategy” of “re-imagin[ing] these provocative images by purifying them” with AI, adding, “Happy cleansing, folks. Let’s Make The Internet Pure Again, one reformed e-thot at a time.”
The campaign has also popped up on other platforms known for far-right activity, such as Telegram and far-right forum TheDonald. And it has also spread across multiple mainstream platforms, with accounts seemingly dedicated to the campaign and content promoting it.
On X, an account named after the campaign has more than 30,000 followers, and posts on the platform with the #dignifAI hashtag and the same sort of imagery have earned tens of thousands of views, according to X’s view count. Another apparent account dedicated to the campaign has popped up on TikTok and YouTube.
Also on YouTube, a video titled “Best Use of AI Yet” defended the campaign, receiving over half a million views.
On Facebook and Instagram, posts promoting the campaign and featuring similar images as those on 4chan have earned over 16,000 interactions, according to Meta’s CrowdTangle tool.
