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Given that it was literally a terms of service violation, and resolution was to remove the content in question (ie. this wasn’t GitHub saying “we were wrong” it

Given that it was literally a terms of service violation, and resolution was to remove the content in question (ie. this wasn’t GitHub saying “we were wrong” it was them saying, don’t do that or you’re banned)… it seems difficult to be particularly sympathetic.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
The terms should be changed. A violation of terms that they themselves created isn’t automatically right. It’s unclear it’s even technically right, let alone morally or strategically. This has “kickstarter bans Unstable Diffusion” vibes. Can anyone cite the relevant TOS section? It’d be good to know how far they’re trying to extend the moderation umbrella.
- voxic11 4y ago
  > We do not allow sexually themed or suggestive content that serves little or no purpose other than to solicit an erotic or shocking response, particularly where that content is amplified by its placement in profiles or other social contexts. This includes: ...Pornographic content https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-policies/github-sexually-obscene-content https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici... Now on the other hand this wasn't actually pornographic content, it was links to pornographic content and their TOS doesn't really make it clear that linking is not allowed.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    Haha they have a lot of spam to cleanup then. A frequent discovery of mine is a new foothill of the mountains of spam text dumped onto GitHub. No idea what half of it is there for since it’s not even connected to a GitHub pages setup most of the time. Usually I’ll find them a few pages back for a code search where the spellchecker has helpfully ignored pluralisation and punctuation and I’m getting lots of generic results but for a long enough string of words to narrow down GitHub to the long tail of noise… Lots of txt and markdown and html and textish formats filled with keywords and phrases, some of which are surprisingly suggestive, arguably outright pornography… Oh and there’s the matter of all the code on GitHub related to adult websites and the pornography that they contain, heaps of web scraping scripts to harvest videos and pictures from “tube websites” … the flip side of the coin as well, the content moderation tools like perceptual hashing tools and ML models for adult content or nudity detection that need to include sample images as part of testing and training data… This feels like an area GitHub really shouldn’t be fucking with with respect to the whole “what counts as acceptable”, it’s one thing to prevent people using GitHub to host a free porn site via GitHub pages, it’s another to start policing the definition of acceptable discourse on the topic of adult content and machine learning models, particularly given that machine learning is a highly technical topic and the state of the art is an evolving field full of deeply technical people. I’m deeply unimpressed by the results from stable diffusion but I do see other people having success with it. For me even the most basic things seem to come out mutated and the same efforts to improve non pornography related human depictions from stable diffusion type models will also be applicable to porn … if the hands on my “18th century porcelain doll of a cowboy“ look like some kind of teratogenic mutant out of a bad hyper realistic cartoon, then the porn version can’t be much better and while rule 34 exists the majority of “pornography consumers” looking to ML model based content probably don’t want that either which leads to a sort of “dual use technology” style stand off between the “pornography” and “non-pornography” uses of the exact same technology. GitHub are walking a thin line here and it’s not going to get easier for them.

sillysaurusx 4y ago

The terms should be changed. A violation of terms that they themselves created isn’t automatically right. It’s unclear it’s even technically right, let alone morally or strategically. This has “kickstarter bans Unstable Diffusion” vibes. Can anyone cite the relevant TOS section? It’d be good to know how far they’re trying to extend the moderation umbrella.

voxic11 4y ago
> We do not allow sexually themed or suggestive content that serves little or no purpose other than to solicit an erotic or shocking response, particularly where that content is amplified by its placement in profiles or other social contexts. This includes: ...Pornographic content https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-policies/github-sexually-obscene-content https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici... Now on the other hand this wasn't actually pornographic content, it was links to pornographic content and their TOS doesn't really make it clear that linking is not allowed.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Haha they have a lot of spam to cleanup then. A frequent discovery of mine is a new foothill of the mountains of spam text dumped onto GitHub. No idea what half of it is there for since it’s not even connected to a GitHub pages setup most of the time. Usually I’ll find them a few pages back for a code search where the spellchecker has helpfully ignored pluralisation and punctuation and I’m getting lots of generic results but for a long enough string of words to narrow down GitHub to the long tail of noise… Lots of txt and markdown and html and textish formats filled with keywords and phrases, some of which are surprisingly suggestive, arguably outright pornography… Oh and there’s the matter of all the code on GitHub related to adult websites and the pornography that they contain, heaps of web scraping scripts to harvest videos and pictures from “tube websites” … the flip side of the coin as well, the content moderation tools like perceptual hashing tools and ML models for adult content or nudity detection that need to include sample images as part of testing and training data… This feels like an area GitHub really shouldn’t be fucking with with respect to the whole “what counts as acceptable”, it’s one thing to prevent people using GitHub to host a free porn site via GitHub pages, it’s another to start policing the definition of acceptable discourse on the topic of adult content and machine learning models, particularly given that machine learning is a highly technical topic and the state of the art is an evolving field full of deeply technical people. I’m deeply unimpressed by the results from stable diffusion but I do see other people having success with it. For me even the most basic things seem to come out mutated and the same efforts to improve non pornography related human depictions from stable diffusion type models will also be applicable to porn … if the hands on my “18th century porcelain doll of a cowboy“ look like some kind of teratogenic mutant out of a bad hyper realistic cartoon, then the porn version can’t be much better and while rule 34 exists the majority of “pornography consumers” looking to ML model based content probably don’t want that either which leads to a sort of “dual use technology” style stand off between the “pornography” and “non-pornography” uses of the exact same technology. GitHub are walking a thin line here and it’s not going to get easier for them.