I searched through Lemmy posts with that word. Half of them have people asking the exact same question, and based on the answers, I'm going to conclude that no one knows.
One guess that seems plausible is that it's an AI hallucinated word that's showing up a lot because they're using AI to generate the captions.
Ive asked the same question, the conclusion that I came to is it is a foreign word that doesnt mean anything in the context and is a give away to AI generated images.
I think it's this. I looked into it recently and there was a paper on AI and they noted "araffe" coming up as a caption when it was AI generated. They didn't have an explanation, said it was something to look into.
It seems to me to be a word that image description generators (and potentially image generators, too) "believe" to exist. If that's correct that was likely caused by parsing chunks of actual words, such as "arabesque", "Arabic", "coffee", "giraffe", as if ara+ffe were two actual morphemes (units of meaning).
For reference, this site claims that [I think?]diffusion models think that a similar word, "arafed", exists; and that's basically going slow, taking one's time, leisurely.
I mentioned in another comment chain, but: even if we claim that "araffe" is ultimately from Welsh "araf", we're still left with the double consonant and the ending -e to explain - those don't even appear in the conjugation of "arafu".
There's some AI model that used it. Its meaning is related to "relaxed and lounging around". I think it appears in automated posts. BLIP can interrogate an image and produce a text description. I suspect that's what happening.
I think, based on responses indicating AI influence, that this is a a worthwhile filter/exclude keyword. I have only encountered the word while viewing /all and it is normally in the /garterbelt forum. Perhaps there is a bot a play?
Whatever/whoever posts these captions used to often use the word "lingers" to describe lingerie. Ex: "Women in lingers on a bed."
One day, some guy responded to a post and said he couldn't take it anymore and to stop saying it. It actually stopped. Hasn't used that word since as far as I've seen.
Echoing what others have said that it so far appears to be hallucinated/AI-coined from everything I've seen so far, as well as that I've seen a variant spelled "Arafed."
Welsh interference is possible, specially given the meaning, but I don't think that it explains alone what's going on. The Welsh word is araf; there's also the associated verb arafu "to slow down", but none of those forms show ⟨ff⟩, or ends with ⟨e⟩.
"TL;DR: GPT-J token embeddings inhabit a zone in their 4096-dimensional embedding space formed by the intersection of two hyperspherical shells. This is described, and then the remaining expanse of the embedding space is explored by using simple prompts to elicit definitions for non-token custom embedding vectors (so-called "nokens"). The embedding space is found to naturally stratify into hyperspherical shells around the mean token embedding (centroid), with noken definitions depending on distance-from-centroid and at various distance ranges involving a relatively small number of seemingly arbitrary topics (holes, small flat yellowish-white things, people who aren't Jews or members of the British royal family, ...) in a way which suggests a crude, and rather bizarre, ontology. Evidence that this phenomenon extends to GPT-3 embedding space is presented. No explanation for it is provided, instead suggestions are invited."
In particular I was reminded of the list of tokens near the beginning of the article, and how it contains not just words, but also fragments of words, prefixes, and things like that. I'm also reminded of another article (which I can't find right now) about people finding ways to bypass word filters by utilizing nonsense words that the LLM has mistakenly associate with some meaning. From what others have said in this thread, 'araffe' sounds like it might be something like that