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Andreessen Horowitz Invests in Civitai, Which Profits from Nonconsensual AI Porn
- superduty 3y ago[flagged]
- erhserhdfd 3y agoCan you elaborate why you think that?
- hiddencost 3y agohttps://wondermark.com/c/1k62/ https://wondermark.com/c/1k62/
- Sunhold 3y agoIt always amazes me that anyone can think this comic makes a good point.
- kmbfjr 3y agoHe’s not alone. You had to be there to endure his antics and reported malleable ethics from the moment he left UI.
- HillRat 3y agoCreating a deepfake marketplace trading in celebrity and private-person identities is ... quite the choice to make, legally (and ethically) speaking.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThe models are free without a login. The only way I would characterizing it as a "marketplace," it individuals offering commissions, I guess.
- dragonwriter 3y agoSome are available early exclusively to paid members, and there are onsite model training and generation services, which are paid (in virtual, but can be bought for cash, currency.)
- brucethemoose2 3y agoWell huggingface and tons of others offer stable diffusion training services. Google essentially hosts dreambooth with options for a subscription. Thats nothing unique. I dunno about early access.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Well huggingface and tons of others offer stable diffusion training services. Huggingface also has porn-focussed trained stable-diffusion models. [0] They also have celebrity-trained models. [1] [0] e.g., https://huggingface.co/WolfAether21/NSFW-STABLE-DIFFUSION-LORA/tree/main https://huggingface.co/WolfAether21/NSFW-STABLE-DIFFUSION-LO... [1] e.g., (yes, poor quality from the samples) https://huggingface.co/lora-library/12jenniferl https://huggingface.co/lora-library/12jenniferl
- dragonwriter 3y agoBut that wasn't the choice, the choice was to create an open hub for basically everything related to Stable Diffusion, with limits for a broad range of illegal things, but without policies against things that are steps out from that because at even one step out the “well, combined with other things it could be used badly” bans everything. The highlighted bounty feature is technically accurately, but misleadingly, described. Yes, people can and do post requests for models of real celebs there, but they also post requests for fictional character models, for concept models not tied to particular real or fictional characters, for technical assistance with model training, for people to generate showcase images for existing models.
- arcticbull 3y agoSo the choice was not screening for it. Regardless, without moralizing, a choice was made. This is a shocked pikachu situation. [edit] The fact is we've had this kind of content for a long time, and we've developed techniques for identifying and removing it. There's great nudity detecting ML models. I suspect the choice was made in part ideologically, and in part to drive sensationalist coverage, and it looks like it's working.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThey do "screen" it in a way. All the models are categorized and tagged, and I think straight up illegal models are moderated out.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> So the choice was not screening for it No, they screen, remove, and ban people for policy violations. (And that has improved over time, at least, the violations that have slipped through have dropped over time.) What isn't a policy violation is separate things which could be combined together or with other things to make something that would be a policy violations.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoHave you used Civit.ai? While it does cater to audiences interested in "adult" content I don't think any of it's active users would characterize it as "a deepfake marketplace trading in celebrity and private-person identities".
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Have you used Civit.ai? The dot in “CivitAI" is between “AI” and “com” if you are referring to the domain name, or just “there isn't one” if you are referring to the name.
- enlyth 3y agoThe article is low quality clickbait. Civitai is just a popular place to host stable diffusion models / LORAs / textual inversions, not some kind of fake nudes marketplace. It's the huggingface of stable diffusion.
- dragonwriter 3y agoHuggingface is the Huggingface of Stable Diffusion (and a lot of stuff is on both.)
- Reubend 3y agoThis is the next pearl clutching headline that people will be reading over and over for any models that generate images. "Oh no, the model can generate porn!" "Oh no, it can generate realistic photos of people!" "Oh no, it can generate violent or racist images!" I'm so sick of people arguing that we should just shut down AI research or commercialization because it could be used maliciously. Think of how many grocery store products could be used maliciously if someone wanted to. Should we not allow people to buy bleach? Should we not allow knives to be sold? People need to get over their misgivings from this new technology and start taking accountability for that fact that models can be abused like any other tool. That doesn't mean we should just not give anyone access to them.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoSo maliciously you gon need an Xray to see where it ended up! They prepping for desurgery now
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kmbfjr 3y agoSorry you are tired of people voicing legitimate concerns, perhaps you can tune them out and use your own likeness in pornography to help these companies speed things along. Ya know, take one for the team so to speak.
- bobthepanda 3y agoIs the article suggesting that it should be shut down entirely? I didn’t read that anywhere. I would actually think that its asking for basic accountability and due diligence.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Is the article suggesting that it should be shut down entirely? No, its misleading by selective focus (like the previous article it references) to get people to come to that conclusion themselves, a much more effective persusasive technique than the explicit demand because with the explicit demand people assume your evidence is selective to support the demand which may have ulterior motive, while they are less likely to do so if your presentation is superficially merely informative but actually selectively crafted to motivate a particular conclusion.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vasdae 3y ago"Nonconsensual AI porn" is a weasel term because it implies that it should be necessary to get someone's consent to create fake porn using their faces.
- bobthepanda 3y agoIt definitely should be. I don’t want my face used for porn if I just randomly shot a stock photo. Controlling likenesses in AI was the whole point of the SAG strike.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoWhat if I hired a human artist to hand draw the fake instead? What if they used Photoshop instead of drawing from a reference?
- bighead 3y agothats still a problem, don't you see it?
- brucethemoose2 3y agoHow can that possibly be enforced though? You can't really stop people from drawing or photoshopping stuff for personal use, and this is essentially a further extension of the technology.
- bobthepanda 3y agoPeople can, and do sue for that successfully. The fact that a small problem exists does not negate the existence of a larger problem.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoOnly if its published, or commercialized, right? Yeah, widely publishing or making money off of someone's likeness is a whole different can of worms. I was thinking for strictly personal use.
- victorevector 3y agoThis appears to be sensationalized. This is the first time I've heard of Civitai, but I perused their website and I found no porn.
- NegativeK 3y agoThere are a lot of porn models and Loras on the site.
- godelmachine 3y agoWhat’s a Loras?
- dragonwriter 3y agoA kind of auxiliary model.
- abrichr 3y agoFrom https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685: > LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models > An important paradigm of natural language processing consists of large-scale pre-training on general domain data and adaptation to particular tasks or domains. As we pre-train larger models, full fine-tuning, which retrains all model parameters, becomes less feasible. Using GPT-3 175B as an example -- deploying independent instances of fine-tuned models, each with 175B parameters, is prohibitively expensive. We propose Low-Rank Adaptation, or LoRA, which freezes the pre-trained model weights and injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture, greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters for downstream tasks. Compared to GPT-3 175B fine-tuned with Adam, LoRA can reduce the number of trainable parameters by 10,000 times and the GPU memory requirement by 3 times. LoRA performs on-par or better than fine-tuning in model quality on RoBERTa, DeBERTa, GPT-2, and GPT-3, despite having fewer trainable parameters, a higher training throughput, and, unlike adapters, no additional inference latency.
- NegativeK 3y agoIt's a smaller (space-wise) model that's much easier to train, both computation and input data-wise. It accomplishes a specific style or goal when combined with a full sized model. An Emma Watson lora: https://civitai.com/models/123338/emma-watson-2010-sdxl?modelVersionId=215872 https://civitai.com/models/123338/emma-watson-2010-sdxl?mode... A lora to add motion trails: https://civitai.com/models/95680/motion-trail-after-image-or-concept-lora https://civitai.com/models/95680/motion-trail-after-image-or... A lora to add a piano/black and white contrast style to the image: https://civitai.com/models/187675/piano-style-ebony-and-ivory-aesthetic https://civitai.com/models/187675/piano-style-ebony-and-ivor... If you view Civitai's list of all loras, sorted by most downloaded, you'll see a _lot_ of porn.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI disagree with the tone of the headline. CivitAI is a good resource, and the rest of AI world could learn from it for, for example, LLM lora/grammar hosting. But I am concerned, for a different reason. Civitai's enshittification potential is sky high. They are hosting loads of enormous models and images for free, on a very spiffy, heavy website. There's no way thats sustainable.
- PheonixPharts 3y ago> Civitai's enshittification potential is sky high. I share these same concerns. What this space desperately needs is to have models shared via torrent. As it is today Civit.ai has had problems with creators decided to take down their own models and suddenly people who were using them have no place to find them. I suspect we'll see more and more lockdowns on what models are deemed "appropriate" and it would be nice to have a decentralized alternative. Not to mention torrenting is the only rational way to sustainably host such large files at no cost.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoUh, I don't want to see an unmoderated, distributed CivitAI. That would be a unspeakable wasteland. And there already are torrents of SD models. Just filter by the .safetensors filetype. If would be nice if their hosting was decentralized though. Users seem to hoard LoRAs and merges in personal collection anyway, mind as well help distroute them so Civit doesn't have to enshittify so quick.
- loandbehold 3y agoBlack Mirror had an episode about this tech, called Joan is Awful.
- srameshc 3y agoNow we just need an AI startup which can fight & Win over such companies who generate Nonconsensual AI Porn, without a need to hire a lawyer.
- jantissler 3y agoWhat a sensationalist headline … I thought 404 Media were supposed to be the good ones. Sad to see them go down that route so quickly.
- WXLCKNO 3y agoI keep seeing 404 more and more these days, hate the name first of all but yeah I agree.
- nickthegreek 3y agoUnsure why your comment is in the grey. I'm with you. When they first came on the scene a few months back they had some nice tech meets the real world articles, but the headlines and articles attached seem to have gone downhill rather quickly.
- snvzz 3y agoCharacter assassination article and headline. Being an investor for some company does not make one responsible for the company breaking the law. Even less so for allegedly breaking the law. How was this not buried instantly?
- cr__ 3y agoWhat’s incorrect about the headline?
- snvzz 3y agoSomebody is targeting this Horowitz person I do not know nor care about. They dug and dug, and found something to attack them with. A connection by investing into a company allegedly doing something illegal and deeply immoral. Let me put extra emphasis: Horowitz isn't allegedly doing something illegal and immoral. A company he is investing on is allegedly doing something illegal and immoral. We're supporting this lynching campaign by tolerating it and giving it attention.
- dgeiser13 3y ago"this Horowitz person"
- snvzz 3y agoWhy highlight this? What, if anything, is wrong with this?
- greenyoda 3y ago"Andreessen Horowitz" is not a person. It's one of the biggest US venture capital firms (whose name comes from the last names of its two founders): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz (And that's stated in the very first sentence of the article being discussed here.)
- gtbcb 3y agoI feel like the long term equilibrium of stuff like this is that in the not too distant future, anyone will be able to easily generate weird deepfake inappropriate porn / content for anyone. It seems unavoidable. I might argue this could be good in that this sort of stuff will become so commonplace that it won't be a big deal and people will learn (be forced to shrug it off). Up until now-ish, the scarcity of celebrity nude leaks and revenge porn type stuff made it somewhat of a forbidden fruit. I like the idea of destigmatizing this sort of stuff so that it loses power. That said, I'm sure there will be some casualties along the way. Eg vulnerable teens who are picked on by mean girls / boys, semi-celebrities / public figures who are targeted by online trolls, etc. I hope that the prevalence of this sort of stuff enlarges the conversation around this, increasing the reach of strategies to deal with this stuff psychologically, and significantly reduces it's impact. I don't know many celebrities or politicians, but I suspect that after they see a few weird / porn related photos of themselves, they stop caring. Thoughts?
- outside1234 3y agoThe company that shilled coins? I'm shocked.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2023/11/14/andreessen-horowitz-backs-civitai-a-generative-ai-content-marketplace-with-millions-of-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/14/andreessen-horowitz-backs-...