The Comedy Central show “Broad City,” in which Ilana Glazer’s character frequently deploys the phrase “yas queen,” also helped to bring the word into wider use.Īccording to, the word “yassification” first appeared on Twitter in 2020. The word was further popularized by a 2013 video of a fan admiring Lady Gaga. The word “yass” - which can also be spelled “yas,” “yaas” or with any number of A’s and S’s for emphasis - has been circulating in L.G.B.T.Q. (In 2017, The Guardian reported that FaceApp’s founder, Yaroslav Goncharov, apologized for the filter, blaming the skin lightening on bias the A.I. FaceApp specifically has been the subject of news articles about privacy issues and its “hot” filter, which was decried as racist for lightening users’ skin tones. Easy-to-use photo-retouching apps aren’t new. The timing of the account’s popularity is a bit puzzling. Adams said in a Zoom interview that each image takes only a few minutes to create. The process for making each image is simple: Take a face, run it through FaceApp until it looks generically or grotesquely sexy, post, repeat. The account is run by a 22-year-old college student in Omaha who makes art under the name Denver Adams and asked that The Times not reveal their legal name. It should be noted that YassifyBot is not actually a bot.
