AI is getting better at generating porn
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The grotesque images: Simply put, the model is not good enough yet. This will improve over time as the models get better.
Diversity/male gaze/heteronormative: Generating men and other genders did not yield very high quality results unfortunately, so I didn't include it in the initial launch. I am also manually fine tuning the prompts, so it was easier to pick one category (women) and go with it. I hope to expand this in the future.
Sex workers: I do agree with the quote in the article that this will not replace sex workers (at least for now) in the same way that I don't think dalle/midjourney/stable diffusion will replace illustrators. In the future, I believe this technology could create a new category of sex worker that can generate content without using their own body (similar to VTubers).
It's harder to say what will happen in the future though. If these models keep improving at this pace, I think these types of discussions will be more important. Let me know if you have any questions!
Scraping an HN comment to post on an article just to get submitted back onto HN for discussion, classic.
I don’t understand this particular aspect of fretting. Do the people making such comments think this won’t be applied eventually to all sexual preferences? Given that heteronormative male gaze drives the vast majority of porn consumption, doesn’t seem surprising that that’s where this kind of thing starts at first.
The bigger concern to me by far is revenge porn and use by children and that has nothing to do with gender.
I’d see two aspects of this:
- it cements the status quo. This technology isn’t bound by the availability of actors, real life societal issues etc, so I understand the disappointment when it follows exactly all the same lines as the current industry.
And a lot of people aren’t happy with the current industry, to say the least.
- there’s a decent chance that yes, that technology won’t be applied to other genres before a long time. Satisfying the majority first means lowering way way down the needs of the minorities. We’ll probably see incremental technical improvements before inclusiveness improvements, except if enough members of the minority become core participants in the development.
You’re going to optimize for a proven market. Indeed, it’s absolutely plausible that the existence of that market drowns out other possible markets from emerging. But how do you get an organization with limited resources to make the less optimal choice?
I guess we need government AI porn.
There is of course a case to make for places with religious laws, but it doesn't looks like the AI devs are thibking about that at this point.
It will follow the same lines as current industry because is the almost literal (if very complex and sophisticated) average of current industry input.
An unfortunate quality of AI simulation output is it "freezes" the structure of it's training set, maintaining societal preferences exactly as-is.
It depends on your country, but most western societies have piss poor sex education. I think it got a lot better, but we still mostly expect parents to have "the talk" (like it was just a single conversation...). There is unlimited amounts of media touching on relationship dynamics, but comparatively way few fewer touching on sex itself, as we commercially punish that depiction.
What we have left to cover that is porn.
So yes, I think what porn touches on, what's depicted, and having a broad landscape matching as many orientation as we can accept actually matters. Porn restrictions are bound to a society's moral compass, I don't know if improving porn can bias toward a better direction as well, but at least we could try.
Did the person who is so depressed over this seriously think it would be male nudes specifically targeted to a female audience that will first make it into production?
Super disingenuous woke virtue signalling.
“Woke culture” isn’t an actual thing, it's a propaganda terms that applies to a fiction deliberately created for partisan political purposes.
But the real world social justice and DEI communities do in fact talk a fair amount about height bias as an aspect of physical. appearance discrimination, and it is by no means limited to women, though that may be where it shows up most in mate selection (it's very prominent, outside of mate selection, as a bias in assessments of competency across the board, and shows up a lot in the workplace.)
I don't know what you are talking about. I assume from both the term and the claims you make about it, that you are using “woke culture” in its standard use, as a term for a thing which exists only in the right-wing propaganda and the minds of those influenced by it, in which case it is not a terminology problem, but an understanding of reality problem.
The current model isn't very good at portraying any specific sexual act - but I imagine that will change soon enough.
It's already great at producing "tasteful nudes", which fortunately aligns well with my personal tastes.
Here are some of the highlights from my tinkering (NSFW, obviously)
(some images have received minor touch-ups, such as cropping or hiding mangled hands - it's not very good at those)
How about 'Tasty nudes' https://imgur.com/a/Q6QSfAA
By definition [these systems are] going to represent those whose bodies are accepted and valued in mainstream society
What an ironically contradictory juxtaposition.
But no, really. Go join the Unstable Diffusion discord if you are brave enough for the body horror. This is not your grandpappy’s porn stash.
edit found it https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010982959525929010/1...
Almost looks like what happens in 3D games when collision detection doesn't work.
Not with great results though I’d say.
I would expect those to be similarly illegal in the same jurisdiction.
> What would have been the rationale?
If I see a photo of ice cream, I tend to crave real ice cream.
Would you say this works for other things? Esp. violence? Should all depictions of violence be banned? Or any undesirable behavior? The list may be long.
But more importantly, what you're describing is advertising. An image of an ice cream isn't an ice cream.
Porn works differently. It doesn't advertise for real sex. Porn conflates the representation and the thing itself into one; it delivers gratification directly, something an image of an ice cream doesn't do.
If I find myself sexually aroused by violence.
> But more importantly, what you're describing is advertising.
Sure. We restrict or prohibit advertisements of certain things. Including child sexual abuse on that list is probably OK.
> Porn works differently. It doesn't advertise for real sex.
I'm not sure I agree. There are, for example, indications consumers of porn are more likely to request / engage in certain sex acts common in porn, like facials, anal sex, choking, etc. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32081698/
The full paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract at least doesn't appear to make any conclusion w.r.t. causality. It's just as likely (if not more so) that people who are more likely to request / engage in certain sex acts will tend to prefer porn featuring them.
If it is a crime then it means any model which can generate CP under any circumstances will be illegal.
Don't count on the legal system to go "haha you got me touché" on this.
This has already been the case for quite some time. AI doesn't really add anything new to that part of the equation.
Apple has AI software the searches for photos given a text query (Siri feature I guess).
Searching for “baby” produces breast-centric photos of my naked wife posing in a sexy manner.
I mean I get the “breast/baby” connection - not rocket science. But I’d appeciate it if SFW queries didn’t product NSFW results.
No you don't, it just generated it and display it to the screen, it doesn't save it anywhere, you at no point posses it. Only solution is that everyone who posses a model capable of generating CP is seen as having CP.
"It's not my pot, officer! I was just holding it for someone!"
If you accidentally generate something inappropriate once with a poorly chosen prompt or an algorithm glitch, and it lives for a few seconds in your RAM before you close it, sure.
If a jury sees your generation history with a bunch of clearly "gimme that CSAM" queries, I wouldn't anticipate an acquittal.
There's a few reasons that consuming CSAM can be immoral:
- encouraging further production by adding view count, ad revenue, social encouragement to creators.
- compounding victimization by improving circulation.
- apparent gateway effect, either in the individual consuming it or by allowing a culture of tolerance.
It's the same logic for snuff films.
AI created CSAM basically removes the first two issues and leaves the third. But I'd add that the third is somewhat up for debate unless there's some specific evidence from psychology (although my default assumption is that you're right on this). And I'd add that there's some argument that it reduces the demand for real CSAM.
Please provide some evidence for this.
Sexual preferences are a given; some people are attracted to the opposite sex, some people are attracted to the same sex, some people are attracted to children. Nothing they (or anyone) can do about it, lest one decides to indulge in so-called "conversion therapy".
Of course, children can't consent, and abusing children is horrible. And child porn is horrible because it implies children have been abused to produce it.
But AI-generated child porn, however nauseating it might sound, doesn't hurt anybody.
You're looking at it too narrowly. AI-generated CSAM may facilitate a sexual interest in children among certain individuals. Development of such an interest makes it significantly more likely they will abuse children. So it ought be illegal.
The analogy is not apt. You cannot compare image-based abuse of children with a video game. GTA is a legitimate form of entertainment, child abuse material is not. They are not remotely similar. This shows why analogies are almost never helpful and it's best just to focus on the topic under discussion.
You can generate whatever you want on your own PC, but if you try to use it for fraud or to share illegal material then you are a criminal.
Why on Earth any normal person would specifically look for CSAM material be it AI generated or not? I doubt that many people who seen something sickening on internet immediately became attracted to it and huge percent of people who use internet for 10+ years seen all kind of terrible things. Unfortunately anyone who hosted or moderated online communities had to deal with a lot of terrible things.
Also we have whole army of youtube / facebook / twitter moderators who actually see CSAM daily and we dont have stories about everyone of them turning into child-abusers. Though it's proven that this kind of job can make person mentally ill, but for completely different reasons.
PS: Again be it AI generated or not I totally sure that CSAM should stay banned from sharing. But I dont give a damn about what you paint, generate and watch on your own PC.
One could make the opposite argument, too. If you give pedophiles AI-generated CSAM, it reduces the demand for real CSAM, thereby reducing production of real-world CSAM, thereby reducing child abuse. Moreover it provides pedophiles their fix without them having to actually abuse a child.
In the end these are all armchair speculations made from our intuitions about individual psychology and group psychology.
We dont require image editors to have CSAM filters and requiring filter for ML model is madness.
There are two separate questions to be answered here:
1. Is it immoral?
2. Is it sufficiently immoral to warrant imposing my own moral standard upon others, by force if necessary? i.e. is responding to or preventing it with violence itself moral?
Morality is subjective and relative, which is why it's interesting to ask both questions: given the subjectivity and relativity of morality, at what point does your own moral code take precedence over those of others?
This will be a bigger disaster than the war on drugs, because it's almost impossible to provide proof. So what's left is convicting people based on oral testimony alone ...
At the same time I think everyone should be free to wrire / paint / generate whatever material they want on their own computer within comfort of their house. As long as no one gets hurt I dont give a damn.
What? Of course you can curate what you feed and have filters to train your ML model
I am sure it is currently easier to train a model with legal sex content and without any children
Also the law is still the same, having and distributing pedophilia content is illegal
Most publicly available sources of sexual content are adult, legal, don't have children
So if you feed Pornhub to your model, which most porn is actually well tagged, as is many ML data, you really have to go out of your way to get any children
Not saying is not possible, I am saying is easy to avoid. Not as an impossibility to separate both as you suggested above
If your training data have any absolutely innocent children pictures at all and also NSFW content with adults then model will be able to generate NSFW content with children. It's that simple.
Also even if you remove any children completely from training model will still be able to generate CSAM-like content because a lot of legit porn include jailbait models.
Actually there are studies suggesting that letting known child molesters access to child porn cartoons reduces recidivism.
Decent review of some of the evidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por...
In reality, if it is the case that this will satisfy some people desires, then it may be the case that fewer children are abused this way, in which case it would be a bad idea to ban it.
There’s no genetic or development-while-in-womb explanation for why some people are specifically sexually into the idea of someone taking on the properties of a giant blueberry.
What is a fetish? It is the scar that guides the knife.
People are deeply uncomfortable with it, especially these days, but of course child-rearing families are the place were nature actually intends there to be sex, where there's almost guaranteed to be sexual activity. Probably the younger the child, the better the odds of sex. And, of course, this is not bad at all: that's how human society has worked for hundreds of thousands of years, how every animal society has worked for a billion or so years.
This probably "gives an advantage" to that particular sexual preference. You learn sexual behaviours, and the first ones you'll learn are heterosexual ones. There's nothing wrong with that ... or at least I don't think there is.
I suppose it must have been trained on something? Are you 100% sure it's cool to use the sum of all the images of all the children to generate child porn? Also there might be accidental resemblances to particular living children in the produced images, is that ok?
"Unless you have real-world means to make your opinions reality ... I don't care about your opinions"
Which goes both in the positive and the negative. Both "show it working or you can't do it" and the negative "prevent me from making it working or shut up". You have zero means to prevent such use of the technology ...
Add to that trillions of dollars in reasons not to outlaw the technology itself.
Attempts to enforce this will be worse, much worse, than the war on drugs. Plus, frankly, drugs do a lot more harm than just allowing this fully would do, so hopefully that will mean less attention going into this.
In some jurisdiction even "virtual" child porn is still treated as criminal:
> A sufficient reason, on basis on which Canadian Parliament was warranted to prohibit not only production and distribution (which were not direct question in that case) but also purely private possession of child pornography - even, if it has nothing to do with use of actual children in its production - was, in the Canadian Supreme Court opinion "reasoned apprehension of harm" which may flow from exposing some people to such a materials.
Would GTA helps criminals in their rehabilitation?
I am not an expert on what help they need, but it would not be content that fuels their obsession
For most criminals we give them prison. For people with disorders we give the mental treatment
But possibly they can be treated with psychotherapy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_fluidity
> that is, until you reach her torso, where three arms spit out of her shoulders.
I haven't tried generating porn, but as a pianist I tried to get both DALL-E and stable diffusion to generate pictures of pianists with 3 arms and I've never had it produce a picture of a person with 3 arms. I assumed that's because there's no training material for it to base it on.
I think what happens is that in the early stages of generation, the model picks up on arm-like structures and just keeps building it out. It doesn't realize that the overall structure will be flawed later on.
(3 arms)
https://pornpen.ai/view/B8DguHKatzDvRk7esEX9
(bonus, 3 breasts)
What little non sexual nudity is left (sharing showers at health clubs, for example) is becoming rarer and rarer.
And co-Ed nonsexual nudity is virtually non-existent.
When I was in secondary school in the 90s, we were expected to shower together, but refused to without consequence.
We all signed up for gym class at the last hour so we could shower at home.
Next are actors, screenwriters (gpt-4), all creative industries will fall down.
How much time before Neural Nets remove all UX/UI design, frontend development and other programming related tasks?
5 years? 10 years?