Tom Gerken
Technological journalist
Kayleigh Grest
Sadie said she didn’t think the filter should be authorized on Tiktok without a kind of warning
Tiktok users told BBC that they thought that overweight viral tool should be prohibited from the platform.
Known as “chubby filter”, the artificial intelligence tool (AI) takes a photo of a person and publishes his appearance for seeing weight.
Many people have shared their images before and after the platform with jokes on their different appearance – but others say that it is a form of “body shame” and should not be authorized.
Experts have also warned that the filter could feed an “toxic diet” online and potentially contribute to food disorders.
Tiktok did not respond to a request for comments.
Sadie, who has 66,000 subscribers on Tiktok, is one of those who call the “average” filter to prohibit.
“It was as if girls were like:” Oh, I won because I am thin and it would not be the worst thing to be big, “said Bristol 29 -year -old.
She said that she had been contacted by women who said she deleted Tiktok from their phone because the trend made them feel bad about her skin.
“I just don’t have the impression that people should be ridiculed for their bodies just for the opening of an application,” she said.
Dr. Emma Beckett, a food scientist and nutrition, told BBC that she thought that the trend was “a huge step back” of weight stigma.
“They are just the same old fake stereotypes and tropes on people in larger lazy and imperfect bodies, and something to avoid desperately,” she said.
She warned that this could have a broad social effect.
“The fear of weight gain contributes to food disorders and body dissatisfaction, it feeds the culture of toxic food, making people obsessive food and the exercise in an unhealthy way and open them to scam and fashion products.
“And that puts pressure on everyone to comply with close beauty and health standards, rather than finding what works best for your own body – which hurts everyone, both in physical and mental health.”
Test the “chubby filter”
By Jessica Sherwood, BBC Social News
Filters – which use AI to manipulate a person’s appearance – are common on Tiktok.
Many are harmless – for example, a popular trend gives the impression that a person was made of Lego.
They are often designed by individuals unrelated to Tiktok – as it seems to be the case with the new “chubby filter”.
Some of the most popular videos using the filter have been appreciated from tens of thousands of times.
For this article, I used the filter on myself.
I felt incredibly uncomfortable.
As a person who is very positive and fought with his self -image in the past, using it could not be further from the way I personally use social media and I was not satisfied that Tiktok pushes him first.
The filter has changed all my appearance, complete with text indicating that it “makes you chubby”
This filter appeared on my tiktok page “for you” the other day despite the fact of not engaging with content linked to weight or health.
After watching the video and reading the comments, that was the case – how Tiktok’s algorithm works means that it started to suggest similar videos of other people using the filter, and even another where AI can overturn you.
Fortunately, he also started starting to show me creators who criticized the trend, some of which we talked about for this article.
AI images and filters have become commonplace on Tiktok and quickly agreed to be used for pleasure – in the same way as some Gen -Z and Millennials could remember the Snapchat filters.
But filters like these, although they may seem fun, can be very detrimental to someone’s mental health and encourage them to compare themselves not only to others, but to an unrealistic version of themselves.
“Business” and “toxic”
Nina
Nina said the filter made her “uncomfortable”
The BBC spoke to a number of Tiktok users who said they were uncomfortable with the filter.
Nina, who lives in the north of Wales, said she felt that she was feeding on a “story” spreads online linking the appearance of people with their self -esteem.
“This is a toxic point of view that I thought we are moving away,” she said.
“If a filter is clearly offensive, it should be deleted,” she told the BBC.
Emma, who lives in Ayr, accepted.
“My first thought when I saw the” chubby filter “was how harmful it would be.
“People essentially said that they looked disgusting because they were” chubby “and as a shorter woman, who is essentially like the photo” after “on this filter, it was discouraging for me.”
Emma
Emma said she feared that young girls and boys could see the filter and think that they were “the butt of the joke”
Nina said she was happy to see people criticizing the trend, which she called “immoral and insensitive”.
“We should get up with each other, not honor the bodies,” she said.
Sadie has agreed that it should not be authorized – but she believed that there could be other things that Tiktok could do.
“Maybe it should have a warning,” she said.
“If there are themes of bodily shame or a food disorder or something like that, I think there should be a way to point out where, if these people want to publish it, they publish it, but it is not pushed to a wider audience.”
