Sexualisation of women and girls in Promptbase

cn: sexual imagery, eurocentric beuaty standards

My interest in bias in image generation models has led me to discover Promptbase¹, a “Prompt Marketplace” where you can “find top prompts, produce better results, save on API costs, sell your own prompts.” Whilst the featured prompts are definitely intended to illustrate the creative and high quality, potentially commercial images available prompts can rendered, it doesn’t take long to find that thing the internet is really for…

Put “woman” or “women” into Promptbase and you will see such delights as “Stunning Woman In Lingerie “, “Gorgeous dream woman” (skinny white women in underwear), “Photorealistic Woman Experiencing Pleasure / Calmness” (some of those are definitely orgasm faces). The people returned are overwhelmingly white, thin, conventionally attractive and scantily clad. You can step up the smut to portraiture ratio by searching for “girl” instead, which is deeply creepy. Sidenote, there’s yet to be a single prompt relating to “boy”.

Searching for “man” returns a lot of mandalas, manuals and manga. Some of the images returned for “men” do feature topless, muscular physiques, but there’s a lot more diversity (and a lot less soft porn).

It seems that given the chance to create whatever image they want, regardless of artistic talent or reality, what a lot of people want (or at least think they can make money selling) is… porn. Porn that makes no actual money for sex workers.

1. https://promptbase.com/ ↩