Naturism and Modern Technology: How to cope with it?

These days, if you want to write a blog post that will be picked up by thousands, if not millions of people, you have to write about AI. It’s the buzzword of this time. So welcome to what’s going to be for sure the most viral piece that has ever been published on Naked Wanderings!

Just kidding… Or maybe half at least. AI is everywhere, it’s in our newspapers, on our television, in our mailboxes, and in our naturist resorts. Or at least in the Facebook accounts of those resorts. AI promises to fulfil our wildest dreams or our scariest nightmares, depending on who you ask.

And that’s just one piece of modern technology that is somehow shaping our naturist experience. There are also smartglasses, able to document and do a background check while you’re catching some sun. There’s still our old enemy social media, with their censorship and shadow bans. And then there are the old-school bloggers, who want to share their opinion about all of this.

So here goes…

There was a time when our social media posts really stood out, because we had visuals. Lots of people wrote down their opinions and experiences with naturism, but very few had such an extensive library of pictures from naturist places all over the world. The result of extensive travelling and way too many mornings waking up at sunrise to get the best shots.

Those days are largely behind us. Everyone can produce pictures now without ever pressing the shutter button of a camera (or phone). Ask AI, and it will generate them for you. Of course, there’s a nudity restriction on most mainstream AI platforms, but so is there on mainstream social media. So with a bit of creative prompting, you can produce images that are pretty similar to what we publish on Instagram.

Then there are also the AI flyers. Years ago, we tried to convince naturist resort owners that they should put more effort (or money) into creating better promo material (Read: Make something that doesn’t look like it was created in MS Paint on a Windows 95 computer). Today, we actually wish we were seeing more of the MS Paint stuff again.

Evan Nicks wrote a great piece on Planet Nude about the ChatGPT flyer pandemic. His argument is that naturism is supposed to be THE movement built on authentic, un-airbrushed human bodies, and now the marketing has gone the complete opposite direction with sunset stock-photo landscapes, generic idealised bodies, and every club looking identical.

Not just naturist clubs, by the way. Suddenly, it seems like your local naturist club, bakery, volleyball association, and your grandmother’s bingo group all hired the same designer. For us, it came to a point that we hardly still notice these things anymore. Our brain started to ignore them, and we scroll right past them. And we’re not alone. According to the Planet Nude piece, a majority of millennials and Gen Z distrust AI-generated content. Was that not the public naturist clubs have been trying to attract for years?

Something relatively new on our social media feeds is people (mostly women) standing in front of a camera in a bathing suit talking about their naturist experiences. It looks so real, you would almost believe it, but the bathing suit gave it away, didn’t it? People who want to talk about naturism might do this naked, or covered in a sarong, or even fully clothed. But there’s just no way that they would do it wearing a bikini…

These videos are obviously AI-generated. And here, AI’s refusal to generate nudity actually becomes a huge benefit. For one, because it makes it easy for us to differentiate the fakes from the real people. But for us, content creators, there could be an even bigger risk if the AI guardrail slips. Because there’s so much nude content of us already existing online, we and any other person who has ever published naked pictures or videos could become an easy target of nonconsensual deepfakes. In other words, if AI allowed nudity, it would be a simple trick to turn a few genuine naturist pictures into a porn video.

From the few paragraphs you’ve just read, you might conclude that we’re AI-haters. But you’d be wrong. We’re everything but. AI has helped us a lot over the last few years in many different parts of our workflow. We use lots of AI for research, for monitoring our channels, for reporting, and for a bunch of other tasks that used to take many hours and are now completed within minutes. This gives us a lot more time to create content (or drink beers next to the pool of a naturist resort).

The difficulty is that today, it seems like AI can do everything. So more and more people start using it for literally everything. Also the parts that are supposed to be and remain human. While we try to use AI to make the things we produce better, we’re losing grip on our own thoughts. Suddenly we’re not sharing our own experience anymore, but a machine interpretation of it. Does that make sense?

The super-fast progress of AI may seem scary, but personally, we believe that smart glasses are the things we should be really careful of. Once again, we’re not haters. At this very moment, we don’t own smart glasses yet, but we can’t say that we won’t buy them in the future. It’s excellent technology, but a double-edged sword.

One of the problems for naturists is obvious: Those things look like regular glasses (at least Meta’s Ray-Bans), and they have a camera. Of course, they come with a small light that blinks when someone is filming, so if you look carefully, you will notice this. You think. A quick search on YouTube will show you exactly how to disable the light, leaving no trace… Halloween.

And that was just one problem. Meta is already planning to integrate facial recognition in their smart glasses, which could theoretically surface your name, address, employer, and who knows what else when it’s pointed towards you. It doesn’t take a genius to notice a few blackmailing opportunities here… Halloween II.

The obvious reaction is to just BAN IT! BAN IT ALL! But we’ve done that before, and it wasn’t a huge success. When everyone was embracing social media, naturist clubs were reluctant. It took them many years to catch up. When smartphones became a thing, naturist clubs banned them. To later realise that with the phone, they were actually banning the generation they wanted to attract the most.

So should we just allow all this technology and live with the risk? We don’t think so. Banning the phone was a mistake, but only because it was yet another item on the “Thou Shalt Not” list. If they had framed it differently, it might have worked. And it might still work. Let us explain.

Another big buzzword is “digital detox”. Getting away from all your devices and just being you. Just being. Naturism has a 100-year head start on focusing on true, human connections without artificial boundaries or filters. Maybe now, more than ever, is the time to play that card. Smartphones, glasses, or watches shouldn’t be banned because of fear. They should just not be there because they don’t fit the concept. In a world where we’re constantly virtually connected, naturism is where you connect for real.

How’s that last sentence for a tagline? Now you could use ChatGPT or Claude to create your own version of it. Or just steal it. But we strongly believe that in this day and age, sharing your own version of it will still work best. In any case, whatever you do, please do not have an AI-generated lady in a bikini say it out loud on social media.