5 ms·

> Perhaps it won't be as easy as toggling a switch next to your friend's photo to take their clothes off. Unless an existing reference image exists - whatever

> Perhaps it won't be as easy as toggling a switch next to your friend's photo to take their clothes off. Unless an existing reference image exists - whatever the switch does will be a guess. Many motivated folks already do this with photoshop; it’s all over 4chan and similar message boards (request threads) and has been that way for at least a decade. This is already the reality for celebrities with photoshop - their likeness is returned unclothed in image search. That’s not their body

AlecSchueler 4y ago
That's not really comparable though, as it's basically composite work. The AI has the ability to infer then to "imagine" with photorealistic results. There would be small details kept intact between the source image and the output that would make it feel much more personal than even the best manual fakes of today.
- russdill 4y ago
  We all have the ability to infer and then "imagine" the results.
  - AlecSchueler 4y ago
    But we don't all have the ability to render our imaginations as photorealistic jpegs
    - autoexec 4y ago
      What harm would it cause if we did? If I could imagine you naked and produce a JPG of my fantasy it would still only be fantasy. It doesn't matter if I'm making JPGs, cutting your head out of photos and gluing them to catalogue models, or if I've got a supercomputer making deepfakes. It's still just fantasy... speculative fiction.
      - AlecSchueler 4y ago
        It becomes reified and it can enter the public consciousness tutti dissemination. I can fantasise about an intergalactic space war, and I can even make a screen play and produce Star Wars. If i make the movie or not it's still fantasy, still something I just imagined. But making a representation of it and distributing it vastly alters the power it has to affect public consciousness. Fantasy doesn't equate to harmlessness.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  I'm not sure I'm convinced. There is a lot of variation in details between human bodies that are covered by clothing. You can infer some things, like skin tone and hair color, from other parts of the exposed body with pretty decent accuracy. You can infer general body shape from how the clothes fit. But for things like size, shape, color, hair, birth marks, moles, surgical modifications, etc. of various concealed body parts? All those vary wildly from person to person. Unless you have a reference image that you can use to answer those questions - I can't imagine that you will be able to infer those. If you can't infer those, you aren't getting the real body of the person you are trying to undress. You're getting a dream of what that person might look like if they were to remove their clothes - a dream that is not accurate. Not to discredit what you are saying: those dream images are definitely going to cause an entire generation of discomfort. But the cat is out of the bag and has been for some time. Artists were already capable of creating images like this without consent - but it required more talent than most humans poses to get that onto paper. Photoshop made it possible too. AI is making it even easier. Society is weird about nudity. To be fair, I am too. We have all of these constructs built around the human body and concealing it that many of us have bought into. At it's core, I think the fear of this tech and nudity is that it will be used to "steal dignity" from folks. The question is: can you steal dignity from someone with pencil and paper? Is a photorealistic sketch of your friend unclothed sufficient for them to have lost their dignity? What about photoshop? How about passing your photorealistic sketch through an AI to make it even more photorealistic? At what point have you robbed someone of dignity? Robbing someone of dignity is a social construct, in some ways this form of dignity stealing is something we _allow_ people to do to one another by buying into that construct. I do feel like the narrative we should be pushing is "that isn't my body." If we invest in breaking the construct, my hope is that we can remove the power this holds over people.
  - AlecSchueler 4y ago
    I think this is kind of skirting around the issue. Saying that we can just focus on shifting societal norms around nudity taboos feels unrealistic. How would you envisage that happening in a timescale comparable with the development of deepfake technology? Beyond that, there's also a host of otherwise these materials can be used for targeted harassment. Sending a woman images of "herself" in extreme sexual acts can be traumatising even if the victim knows it's a fake. There's also the rise of "what would you do with her" and "irl girls" pornography on places like Reddit where unconsenting women are targeted by stalkers who sexualize and degrade them publically for kicks. This just gives them further fuel for their obsessive fantasies. The shift to being able to "see" arbitrary women as they'd look in certain positions or level of undress will also change how young men perceive real women in harmful ways in a society where women already have to deal with constant objectification. In terms of inference. Firstly it's about things like lighting, skin tone, background details etc that set the scene for us on the unconscious level and which inevitably leaves the current generation of fakes somewhere in the uncanny valley. Secondly the fact that we know they're fake didn't impact the initial associations our brain will create upon seeing them. If lies were not harmful defamation cases wouldn't be a thing.

AlecSchueler 4y ago

That's not really comparable though, as it's basically composite work. The AI has the ability to infer then to "imagine" with photorealistic results. There would be small details kept intact between the source image and the output that would make it feel much more personal than even the best manual fakes of today.

russdill 4y ago
We all have the ability to infer and then "imagine" the results.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  But we don't all have the ability to render our imaginations as photorealistic jpegs
  - autoexec 4y ago
    What harm would it cause if we did? If I could imagine you naked and produce a JPG of my fantasy it would still only be fantasy. It doesn't matter if I'm making JPGs, cutting your head out of photos and gluing them to catalogue models, or if I've got a supercomputer making deepfakes. It's still just fantasy... speculative fiction.
    - AlecSchueler 4y ago
      It becomes reified and it can enter the public consciousness tutti dissemination. I can fantasise about an intergalactic space war, and I can even make a screen play and produce Star Wars. If i make the movie or not it's still fantasy, still something I just imagined. But making a representation of it and distributing it vastly alters the power it has to affect public consciousness. Fantasy doesn't equate to harmlessness.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
I'm not sure I'm convinced. There is a lot of variation in details between human bodies that are covered by clothing. You can infer some things, like skin tone and hair color, from other parts of the exposed body with pretty decent accuracy. You can infer general body shape from how the clothes fit. But for things like size, shape, color, hair, birth marks, moles, surgical modifications, etc. of various concealed body parts? All those vary wildly from person to person. Unless you have a reference image that you can use to answer those questions - I can't imagine that you will be able to infer those. If you can't infer those, you aren't getting the real body of the person you are trying to undress. You're getting a dream of what that person might look like if they were to remove their clothes - a dream that is not accurate. Not to discredit what you are saying: those dream images are definitely going to cause an entire generation of discomfort. But the cat is out of the bag and has been for some time. Artists were already capable of creating images like this without consent - but it required more talent than most humans poses to get that onto paper. Photoshop made it possible too. AI is making it even easier. Society is weird about nudity. To be fair, I am too. We have all of these constructs built around the human body and concealing it that many of us have bought into. At it's core, I think the fear of this tech and nudity is that it will be used to "steal dignity" from folks. The question is: can you steal dignity from someone with pencil and paper? Is a photorealistic sketch of your friend unclothed sufficient for them to have lost their dignity? What about photoshop? How about passing your photorealistic sketch through an AI to make it even more photorealistic? At what point have you robbed someone of dignity? Robbing someone of dignity is a social construct, in some ways this form of dignity stealing is something we _allow_ people to do to one another by buying into that construct. I do feel like the narrative we should be pushing is "that isn't my body." If we invest in breaking the construct, my hope is that we can remove the power this holds over people.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  I think this is kind of skirting around the issue. Saying that we can just focus on shifting societal norms around nudity taboos feels unrealistic. How would you envisage that happening in a timescale comparable with the development of deepfake technology? Beyond that, there's also a host of otherwise these materials can be used for targeted harassment. Sending a woman images of "herself" in extreme sexual acts can be traumatising even if the victim knows it's a fake. There's also the rise of "what would you do with her" and "irl girls" pornography on places like Reddit where unconsenting women are targeted by stalkers who sexualize and degrade them publically for kicks. This just gives them further fuel for their obsessive fantasies. The shift to being able to "see" arbitrary women as they'd look in certain positions or level of undress will also change how young men perceive real women in harmful ways in a society where women already have to deal with constant objectification. In terms of inference. Firstly it's about things like lighting, skin tone, background details etc that set the scene for us on the unconscious level and which inevitably leaves the current generation of fakes somewhere in the uncanny valley. Secondly the fact that we know they're fake didn't impact the initial associations our brain will create upon seeing them. If lies were not harmful defamation cases wouldn't be a thing.