There’s a piece in The Guardian today titled How the far right is weaponising AI-generated content in Europe. The main illustration of the article is an image from the AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland, the main far-right party in Germany) that shows an AI generated image of an idealised young German woman (blond hair, blue eyes, rosacea levels of make-up), with the text ‘Please don’t come into our country any more. Thanks to the Green party’s migration policies, we have no more need for “Workers skilled in gang rape”’.
The second sentence is a reference to the oft-cited Fachkraftmangel – skilled worker shortage – which is one of the main reasons why immigration is both politically and socially desirable in contemporary Germany. (Anyone who lives here and has ever tried to find a plumber to repair their boiler will be able to vouch for this.)
Unusually, the image actually has a footnote: a link to a government press release about the perceived increase in the occurrence of gang rapes perpetrated by non-germans. The presence of this URL, along with a cursory glance at the press release, gives the impression that this perceived increase is a genuine problem, one that is serious enough to outweigh any need for skilled workers.
But a closer reading of the press release reveals two things. Firstly, that there’s a lot more to it than the extremely simplistic formulation of “more immigration = more gang rape” (which is of course no surprise); and secondly, that the press release was only issued in response a query raised by – guess who? – the AfD.
And why would the AfD raise this query? Well presumably to enable them to produce press material such as this, backed up by official documentation from the Bundestag.
The primary danger here is not the usage of AI; they could equally well have used one of thousands of stock photos of blond haired, blue eyed young women. More concerning should be the fact that they’re really good at this.
This image is the end result of an intentional process that aimed to create a credible danger, with the official stamp of a Bundestag press release to back it up. The snarky text is punchy, pithy and well written (the original is way better than my clumsy translation). In fact I would argue that the clearly artificial photo of the young woman is the least convincing thing about it.
So in the end I think the article in the Guardian grasps at the most sensational and least pressing aspect of this image. But I think there are a couple of AI related points that the topic raises:
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The shortage of skilled workers is real, predominantly in the areas that were designated “essential” during the pandemic: healthcare, logistics, utility, etc. Immigration alleviates this. AI, on the other hand, doesn’t. Try getting Siri to repair your boiler. What AI will do is replace the kind of jobs that are typically performed by artists, writers and musicians in order to pay the rent: illustration, copywriting, jingles - and, as this example makes clear, stock photography. This will have the effect of making it even harder to pursue meaningful cultural work.
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There can be something weirdly powerful about the uncanny, nightmarish imagery AI produces. The image of the young woman is one, minor example of this. But the article also references another recent piece of AfD propaganda: a very dark film about immigration that was circulated around the time of the recent state level elections. It’s… really scary! Perhaps most of all, the airbrushed Aryans! A large part of that is the dystopian quality lent by the use of AI. There’s something about the disturbing, unreal aesthetic which is inherent to everything AI produces that particularly lends itself to this use case. Generative AI’s reliance on statistical analysis and massive scale sampling will always, inevitably, produce results which are simplistic and flattened, devoid of difference (when it’s not producing results which are bonkers, surreal and, yes, nightmarish). Of course “simplistic and flattened, devoid of difference” happens to suit the far right just fine.
