An online advert for an AI video generation tool has been banned by UK regulators due to its use of nudification as a selling point.
The advert, which appeared on YouTube promoting a service called PixVideo, has been deemed “irresponsible, offensive and harmful”.
It displayed a side-by-side comparison images of a young woman illustrating a “before” and “after” use of the software. The comparison suggested that the tool could be used to make the woman depicted naked, with text displaying the message: “Erase anything”.
Nudification, the practice of using AI tools to recreate images, usually of women, to show them naked, has been criminalised in the UK, with the practice being considered extremely harmful.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received a number of complaints following the launch of the ad campaign in January and concluded that PixVideo, the trading name of a company called Saeta Tech, had breached requirements for adverts to not cause “serious or widespread offence” and to not “include gender stereotypes that were likely to cause harm”.
In response to the ASA, Saeta Tech accepted that its ad was likely to cause offence and claimed that while it understood the implications of the marketing, its terms of use prohibit the creation of “sexually explicit content”.
The PixVideo website claims it is targeting content creators, marketers and business owners with its video generation tool, however, the site’s homepage offers templates that are almost exclusively depictions of women, many clearly intended to be sexually explicit.
“We welcomed Saeta Techs’ willingness to remove the ad. However, for the reasons above, we considered that the ad was irresponsible, included a harmful gender stereotype and was likely to cause serious offence,” said the ASA.
Saeta Tech is an Android-based app developer that has been active since 2023. It has released five apps available to download, including several AI-based services. According to AppBrain, its apps have been downloaded more than nine million times.