- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or unwilling to enforce their policies about who can buy ads on their platforms.
While parent company Meta’s Ad Library, which archives ads on its platforms, who paid for them, and where and when they were posted, shows that the company has taken down several of these ads previously, many ads that explicitly invited users to create nudes and some ad buyers were up until I reached out to Meta for comment. Some of these ads were for the best known nonconsensual “undress” or “nudify” services on the internet.
Lot of people in this thread who don’t seem to understand what sexual exploitation is. I’ve argued about this exact subject on threads like this before.
It is absolutely horrifying that someone you know could take your likeness and render it into a form for their own sexual gratification. It doesn’t matter that it’s ai rendered. The base image is still you, the face in the image is still your face, and you are still the object being sexualized. I can’t describe how disgusting that is. If you do not see the problem in that I don’t know what to tell you. This will be used on images of normal non-famous women. It will be used on pictures from the social media profiles of teenage girls. These ads were on a platform with millions of personal accounts of women and girls. It’s sickening. There is no consent involved here. It’s non-consensual pornography.
The AI angle is just buzzword fearmongering though - this is something you could do with photoshop back in the 90s (and people did, usually with celebrities and with varying levels of quality).
Photoshop was not advertised for its ability to make fake nudes. The purpose of Photoshop is not to make fake nudes. It is a general purpose image editor. These two things are distinctly different.
Middle school boys could not create realistic depiction of their classmates engaged in sex with photoshop. At least not without significant time and effort. Now they can generate hundreds of photos in a matter of minutes.
You didn’t have to come out and tell everyone that you’re one of those guys who doesn’t understand the concept of sexual exploitation and consent.
It literally doesn’t matter what you call this. Colloquially the technology is known as “Generative AI”, and it is fully automating the task of making fake nudes to the point that shady websites only require a single input image, and with a few layers of machine learning, are able to spit out a convincing nude.
It was just as fucked up when perverts sexually exploited people with Photoshop, so I don’t understand what your point here is. “AI” has made sexual exploitation fully automated, and there’s absolutely no excuse for defending this.
It’s that all the articles over the last year screaming about the dangers of AI because it can be used for something an interested high school student could use an image editor to do 30 years ago but more easily and arguably at somewhat better quality (depending on the person using photoshop) are being ridiculous because they’re blaming the technology instead of the weirdo using it to doctor an image of that girl at their school and pass it around. And yes, anyone who makes and distributes on of these images of someone should be nailed for revenge porn, harassment and whatever else might apply. I say “and distributes” only because if they never distribute it no one would ever know it exists so there would be no opportunity to bust them.
The best use (ie only good use) for one of these is to feed it an image of something that is definitely not the right kind of image for it and seeing what horrors it invents trying to fill in the blanks. Hand it your buddy with a beer belly and a mountain man beard or a dog or garden gnome something.
Generative AI is being used quite prominently for the purposes of making nonconsensual pornography. Just look at the state of CivitAI, the largest marketplace of Stable Diffusion models online. It pretends to be a community for Machine Learning professionals, but behind the scenes it’s laying the groundwork for all of the problems we’re seeing right now. There’s not an actress or female celebrity that doesn’t have a TI or LoRA trained on their likeness - and the galleries don’t hold back on showing you what these models can do.
At least Photoshop never gained the specific reputation of being a tool for making fake porn, but the GenAI community is leaving no doubt that this is a major use case for image models.
Even HuggingFace turns a blind eye to pornifying models and lolicon datasets, and they’re basically the GitHub of AI models…
Knowledge of fission is often applied to make nuclear bombs, but also to generate nuclear power. We shouldn’t blame AI as a whole for this just because some creeps use it for shitty applications.
That’s kinda why I brought up specific key players and how I consider them complicit. If you don’t want AI to be blamed as a whole, you should want those key players to behave ethically, or they’ll poison public perception of AI as a whole.
Wrong. That took time and effort and some level of knowledge from the user, meaning the end product was still somewhat rare. We already know that a decent “AI” image generator can spit these out in seconds with zero skill or knowledge required from the user.