4 ms·

I bet y'all would make a lot more money charging $8/mo to find porn with the exact facial characteristic someone is looking for. Don't get me wrong, revenge po

I bet y'all would make a lot more money charging $8/mo to find porn with the exact facial characteristic someone is looking for. Don't get me wrong, revenge porn is bad, but charging people money to take it down seems, well I guess better than nothing but let's hope a nonprofit starts maintaining a database like this and completely eliminates any market this site may capture. Also abusing the DMCA for censorship, even in pursuit of a noble cause is harmful to society, though maybe not more harmful than revenge porn? I'm really curious how our culture will continue to reckon with the ideas that a) There are intimate images extant of many people. Many will become most. b) AI powered face swapping and image generation will make arbitrary porn trivial on home-gamer GPUs in a few years.

lja 4y ago
The idea of charging $8/mo for someone to look at anyone's photos online is pretty far off brand for us. We're really looking to help people find just their own photos. I do agree the market would be larger but that's not something we're interested in doing. That breaks ethical barriers for us. We have to charge money to cover our expenses, most people don't realize how expensive GPU's are and that's the only way to do this cost effectively at scale. Even a non-profit would incur enormous expenses because there is just no way to do this cheap. There is no abuse of the DMCA process here. Customers are asked to sign an affidavit and we don't allow them to DMCA outside of their facial profiles.
- thot_experiment 4y ago
  I just don't feel like your motives can possibly be aligned with victims if you're trying to make money off victims. RE: DMCA abuse, it's probably within the letter of the law, the law itself is broken. Bonus question: How does this all deal with twins? What's the miss rate on facial recognition anyway?
  - lja 4y ago
    We're partnered with RAINN and other sexual abuse agencies to give victims in extreme situations free access to our site. Our alignment isn't perfect but we are working to be a useful tool at a low cost. Some things provide a social good but also have expenses, this happens to be one of them. Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients and we aren't anywhere near those margins. EDIT: Twins are still a weak spot for us, but we have a plan to build a model that can tell two twins apart.
    - thot_experiment 4y ago
      Good answers, I would find this a lot more palatable if you went much harder on the "charity/help" angle. I didn't see any mention of that when I was browsing the site and that's probably something you should be highlighting. > Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients. Yeah I'm aware, but because that happens doesn't mean it's the most prosocial system we can implement. I think that you're probably doing good on net and I probably shouldn't have been so negative. I do worry though that inadequate capitalistic solutions to these sorts of problems serve to preserve a bad status quo in the long run and may end up doing more harm than good?
    - saurik 4y ago
      So, I do understand that it costs you money, but I'm agreeing with thot_experiment: it doesn't feel right, at least for the "victims of NCII" use case (as opposed to the "creator" use case with the $100/mo plan... I frankly think the pricing there is a bit high, but hopefully you've talked with enough sex workers to verify that works for them; honestly, if your website were focused more on that use case, and downplayed the victim one, I'd find it more consistent). Instead of a bunch of happy customers of your service, you are going to see people complain constantly about your product and consider you a "protection racket". You are also going to find yourself in the situation where the people you are helping are claiming you are "in cahoots" with the porn companies, particularly when they realize that they have to keep paying your subscription fee in order to avoid their stuff being posted again and again to different sites. Some things are just asking for a world of hurt, and you need to really really play up the charity angle here and frankly attempt to fund as much of this as possible off of people who aren't the victims you are trying to protect or from a narrative perspective--which a lot of people don't spend enough time analyzing--you are going to spend the rest of your existence playing defense against your own target market feeling like you are part of their problem. (My credentials here, with respect to talking about "narratives": I'm a well-known engineer who used to spend a lot of time attempting to correct the story developers would tell around jailbreaking and piracy--in some cases due to the mere word "jailbreaking", which I had not myself chosen as I wasn't there at the beginning--and who later went into politics and has been an elected government official in a dense college community for the past five years.)
  - aliswe 4y ago
    What the hell

lja 4y ago

The idea of charging $8/mo for someone to look at anyone's photos online is pretty far off brand for us. We're really looking to help people find just their own photos. I do agree the market would be larger but that's not something we're interested in doing. That breaks ethical barriers for us. We have to charge money to cover our expenses, most people don't realize how expensive GPU's are and that's the only way to do this cost effectively at scale. Even a non-profit would incur enormous expenses because there is just no way to do this cheap. There is no abuse of the DMCA process here. Customers are asked to sign an affidavit and we don't allow them to DMCA outside of their facial profiles.

thot_experiment 4y ago
I just don't feel like your motives can possibly be aligned with victims if you're trying to make money off victims. RE: DMCA abuse, it's probably within the letter of the law, the law itself is broken. Bonus question: How does this all deal with twins? What's the miss rate on facial recognition anyway?
- lja 4y ago
  We're partnered with RAINN and other sexual abuse agencies to give victims in extreme situations free access to our site. Our alignment isn't perfect but we are working to be a useful tool at a low cost. Some things provide a social good but also have expenses, this happens to be one of them. Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients and we aren't anywhere near those margins. EDIT: Twins are still a weak spot for us, but we have a plan to build a model that can tell two twins apart.
  - thot_experiment 4y ago
    Good answers, I would find this a lot more palatable if you went much harder on the "charity/help" angle. I didn't see any mention of that when I was browsing the site and that's probably something you should be highlighting. > Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients. Yeah I'm aware, but because that happens doesn't mean it's the most prosocial system we can implement. I think that you're probably doing good on net and I probably shouldn't have been so negative. I do worry though that inadequate capitalistic solutions to these sorts of problems serve to preserve a bad status quo in the long run and may end up doing more harm than good?
  - saurik 4y ago
    So, I do understand that it costs you money, but I'm agreeing with thot_experiment: it doesn't feel right, at least for the "victims of NCII" use case (as opposed to the "creator" use case with the $100/mo plan... I frankly think the pricing there is a bit high, but hopefully you've talked with enough sex workers to verify that works for them; honestly, if your website were focused more on that use case, and downplayed the victim one, I'd find it more consistent). Instead of a bunch of happy customers of your service, you are going to see people complain constantly about your product and consider you a "protection racket". You are also going to find yourself in the situation where the people you are helping are claiming you are "in cahoots" with the porn companies, particularly when they realize that they have to keep paying your subscription fee in order to avoid their stuff being posted again and again to different sites. Some things are just asking for a world of hurt, and you need to really really play up the charity angle here and frankly attempt to fund as much of this as possible off of people who aren't the victims you are trying to protect or from a narrative perspective--which a lot of people don't spend enough time analyzing--you are going to spend the rest of your existence playing defense against your own target market feeling like you are part of their problem. (My credentials here, with respect to talking about "narratives": I'm a well-known engineer who used to spend a lot of time attempting to correct the story developers would tell around jailbreaking and piracy--in some cases due to the mere word "jailbreaking", which I had not myself chosen as I wasn't there at the beginning--and who later went into politics and has been an elected government official in a dense college community for the past five years.)
- aliswe 4y ago
  What the hell