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…
Promo material for everybody
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?
The woman in bathing suit talking about naturism
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.
Is AI just evil? Absolutely not.
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?
Thought this was scary? Here comes Halloween!
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.
So should we stop it all?
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.
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Thanks for this insightful and humorous article!
You hit the nail on the head regarding those standardized marketing visuals flooding social media. As the illustrator behind the Nus au Soleil project, my posters and artwork are entirely hand-drawn without any AI, precisely to keep that authentic and unique touch. I do use AI, but strictly for everyday administrative tasks—like helping me draft certain emails or translating my content—never for the creative work itself.
What resonates most with my own experience, though, is that incredible sense of wellbeing you feel on a naturist beach, away from network coverage and our devices. Not having a phone within reach is the ultimate way to completely let go and reconnect with the present moment, the wind, the sun, and genuine human connections.
Let’s continue to prioritize humanity and the real world… and enjoy a nice beer by the water without any smart glasses! ☀️
Yeah, we often think about how much this has to upset real illustrators
A great article which raises a lot of questions.
As for smart glasses, they just bring filming and taking pictures in public to it’s logical conclusion and will be the biggest threat to our privacy in public without proper controls. No way should facial recognition be allowed and the filming light shouldn’t be able to be disabled. The close friendship of the tech giants with the current President of the United States means that these controls are unlikely to be put in place. That will discourage new people from taking up naturism and may also cause some existing naturists to abandon the lifestyle.
To be fair, the fact that the filming light can be disabled is not a feature created by the producers. But they could probably put a censor that checks whether the light is on or off and make the glasses perform accordingly. We’re not tech experts, we’re just guessing. The ability to film and gather information already exists since the smartphone, but along the way, our brains have been trained to recognise “abnormal” smartphone usage. Maybe the same will happen with glasses… The future will tell…
My concern is that if Ai glasses that recognize faces then match that up with other personal data, people will be reluctant to visit nudist places due to loss of privacy. Fortunately I don’t work. I do suspect my employer would have had a few things to say about my nudist life.
I don’t have any ideas how resorts and camps are going to deal with this. It will be a problem, a big problem that hopefully can be addressed.
We can only guess what the future will bring. A decade or two ago, people also thought that smartphones would be the end of nudism, and now everyone uses them to find the next nudist campground… AI glasses are a threat for sure, and as you say, it will all depend on how they are handled. Today, they are not a necessity (like our phone is) so they can still be banned easily. But one day, they might become yet another thing we use on an hourly basis. Of course, they can also be used by resorts, to quickly scan incoming guests on whether they are already blacklisted in other resorts. It’s too early to tell…
I have a small, one site campground that is clothing optional. I get requests from customers about connectivity. Will I have cell service? Is there WiFi? And a few others. Some carriers work here, but it’s in a hollow by a creek and since the best season for camping is when there are leaves on the trees, service is spotty. I’ll never add any extra connectivity, because it goes against the whole point of totally getting out in nature.
It’s all about how you sell it. If you sell just a campsite, people will need connectivity. If you sell a few days of going back to nature without any disturbance whatsoever, they’ll understand. At some Buddhist retreats, you sleep in a room with no furniture on a bed with no mattress, and people pay the same as at the 5 star hotel around the corner… Framing is everything.
Do we really need to be so afraid of technology, smartglasses and smartphones?
We’re out there in public, we’re not doing anything wrong. If someone captures our face along with our name and address, ok, it is stalking and a violation of privacy in any circumstances.
But as for the actual act of being recorded – so what?
Writen from the European perspective. I understand that in other parts of the world it may be very different.
We totally understand what you mean. In our experience, the risk that someone records you is by default pretty low, the risk that they’ll spread the footage on the internet is even lower, and the risk that someone you know accidentally stumbles upon it is again much lower. But it’s a big fear for many…