We are trading our privacy for convenience and these companies know it. We, the consumers, have the power, if we stop using their programs these companies will fail, but unfortunately, due to the comfort created by these convenient tools, too many if not most have become passive.
At this point, we are at the end of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and extremely close to George Orwell's 1984, unless we truly recognize our power and fight back.
As part of Glamour’s Stop Image-Based Abuse campaign, we investigate the insidious evolution of digital blackface.
Dark-skinned Black women are going viral for their trending TikTok and Instagram dances. But a Glamour investigation has found that many of these accounts aren’t actually real women. What’s worse? In many cases, they’re linked to paid-for subscriber content services, directing users to legally dubious, AI-generated, sexualised content.
These AI influencers are built by scraping real Black women creators’ content without consent, replicating their faces, bodies and movements for views and profit. Their personas are often exaggerated and hyper-sexualised with darker, unrealistic skin tones, fetishised features, and content that appears increasingly tailored toward adult audiences. Experts describe this as a form of ‘synthetic doppelgänging’, where AI creates near-identical digital doubles that mimic real people while sidestepping image rights protections, marking a new, more insidious evolution of digital blackface.
Glamour investigates the rise of this disturbing phenomenon, exploring how lagging digital safety policies are still failing Black women online.