17 ms·

It is impressive how much effort the human race is spending trying to prevent algorithms from generating pictures of naked people.

justapassenger 3y ago
[flagged]
- EA-3167 3y ago
  Maybe the ability to generate naked images of anyone will change how we view nudity. Because while that seems difficult, realistically its more doable than putting this genie back in the bottle. People are horny, people are curious, and the result is predictable.
- egeozcan 3y ago
  Let's focus on trying to raise a mentally healthier generation and take mental illness more seriously, rather than banning / getting rid of all the things that might cause someone (let alone a teenager) to commit suicide (an infinite set).
  - justapassenger 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - Spivak 3y ago
    Boiling the ocean type solutions are the same as doing nothing. A better solution would be to make creating such things very illegal and bring down the same wrath we do for CSAM. There is no amount of "mental health" that can protect you against targeted bullying of that magnitude. I really wish we had a universe simulator so you could see how miserably you would fail to survive an environment like that.
    - creer 3y ago
      Isn't bullying already illegal and why aren't you spending that effort on enforcing THAT?
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      If a naked picture of you is causing you to choose suicide I think we need to fix how society views nudity. The answer isn't to make nudity illegal. We're going to end up blinding ourselves on purpose to avoid seeing our own nudity if we go down your road.
      - Spivak 3y ago
        It's not a naked photo. It's 1. Complete loss of privacy and control over your image. 2. Shame and embarrassment, especially in high school where every boy will look at you different and reduce you to a sexual object. 3. Public humiliation -- those photos can and do lead to ridicule and bullying. You're the one who is naked while everyone else is clothed. 4. Destroys self-esteem -- high school is already terrible in this regard but it's hard to have any kind of self worth when a sex object and some porn is how your classmates know you. 5. Takes away your agency -- its doesn't matter if the photos aren't real, they can make you do anything in those photos and to a 3rd party viewer there's no difference. 6. It's degrading -- they're not gonna be tasteful nudes and pretending as such is naive. And it doesn't matter if you don't find the acts degrading when everyone else does. It's not making nudity illegal, it's making and distributing sexually explicit images of a person whiteout their consent illegal.
        ipaddr 3y ago
        Some bullies make people feel shameful for getting an `A' in highschool. The humiliation and self-esteem happens. If someone succeeds at a high level others try to bring them down. The answer isn't to make getting an 'A' illegal. The answer is to challenge the bullying and to not to allow it to gain power.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - philwelch 3y ago
    “Taking mental illness more seriously” is a vague and double edged sword. In the sense that we have been taking mental health more seriously, we have only made it worse, especially with children and teens. It’s normal to feel down or to be anxious sometimes; a lot of kids will pathologize these feelings rather than treating them as ordinary life obstacles to overcome. I agree with the goal of helping kids be more emotionally resilient but I don’t think the mental health framing is helpful in this regard.
    - anon373839 3y ago
      Well, emotional resilience is mental health. I think the problem with mental health framing is label obsession, rather than thinking of mental health like physical health: something to be maintained through healthy habits. If you want to be physically healthy, you eat nutritious, balanced foods and get regular exercise and sufficient sleep. If you want to be mentally healthy, you practice healthy ways to experience and work through your negative feelings rather than trying to avoid or control them. Etc.
      - philwelch 3y ago
        You’re completely right, and if “mental health awareness” was what you’re describing, it would be a lot more effective.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Like bullying, there's a fix for it, but schools (especially public schools) typically lack the resources, capabilities, and incentives to do anything about it.
  - joenot443 3y ago
    AI stuff aside, what's the cure for bullying?
    - creer 3y ago
      Education? Supervision and intervention? Supportive environment? Friendship? Discovery of the people around us? Anonymous support forums? Peer contacts? Not making self-defense illegal? I mean I'm sure we could launch more research into what might possibly work but we do have some to get started with. It's not like ONLY non-verbal people are being bullied and can('t) talk about it.
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      Removing the kid gloves when dealing with bullies. Mandatory mental health resources and support, along with fines proportional to wealth for the parents. Basically here's everything you need to curb your kids bullying. If you can't, it's going to cost you.
      - Pugpugpugs 3y ago
        [flagged]
- voxl 3y ago
  This is a justifiable worry, but there are two reasons we shouldn't accept it: 1. If there are easy nudes of _everyone_ then there are no nudes of anyone. Admittedly, this is going to take a bit to culturally sink in, but eventually a generated nude will have very little value outside of a perverts own personal desires. 2. "Think of the children" has always been a very poor argument used to artificially restrict the freedoms of everyone else. The problem is that what you're worried about is already possible. It happens less often, sure, but if someone is really nefarious they can make it happen without too much effort.
  - justapassenger 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Pugpugpugs 3y ago
      [flagged]
- pdntspa 3y ago
  And so, once again, everybody else suffers because "think of the children"
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - pdntspa 3y ago
      More of a general observation about how white knights use "the children" like a truncheon to bash on the things they don't like And who fucking cares if it's generating porn. There's nothing wrong with sex or sexual desire. Who are you to judge? Let people have their fun.
    - wruza 3y ago
      We don’t actually have numbers on how many people ended their life for being unable to generate porn they want. Before calling this idea absurd or too far fetched (which it likely is), think about those who ought to end their life because of pics they don’t want and compare the fetch distances. It’s amusing how society tends to ignore a thousand miles leading to an unfortunate event and only focuses on the last one. This way of thinking leaves everyone suffering right on the edge without ever addressing a whole mountain of issues on which that edge situates.
      - pdntspa 3y ago
        It's extra amusing (read: horrifying) how moralists use children to manipulate people and bypass their sense of reason to go straight for the monkeybrain. As a society, we need to call this out and shut it down as soon as it arises. Preferably whilst shutting down the people and organizations who do it.
        creer 3y ago
        we can call it for what it is: Bullying. (But I like "corruption" also.)
- 73473473 3y ago
  [flagged]
- creer 3y ago
  Making clicks illegal would solve that right up. (Solve bullying I mean.)
- swayvil 3y ago
  Do we blame the taboo or do we blame that which cracks the taboo?
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  But allowing everyone to generate fake nude pictures of anyone person whatsoever could possibly fix that? At least that approach worked in South Park.. : D
- katbyte 3y ago
  It’s already happening with photoshop, ai just makes it easier. You can’t stop the creation of these images only deal with the result.
  - acdha 3y ago
    This is like saying it’s no big deal for everyone to carry around a machine gun because humans have been stabbing each other for centuries. Scale and lowered skill barriers are transformative: you’d have to have a pretty epic middle school grudge to spend hundreds of hours learning Photoshop well enough to produce equally realistic fakes, whereas there are now apps which would allow anyone with an iPhone to spend a few minutes getting the same result. That matters because once you realize the false dichotomy you can discuss intermediate steps: for example, if businesses have legal requirements to watermark output, answer legal requests to identify the user who produced an image, or apply a robust NSFW filter, etc. that certainly wouldn’t prevent all abuse but it would make a difference for the majority of school kids who a don’t have the skills to setup an entire open source ML toolchain. Where this especially matters is curated experiences. A lot of businesses would like to offer ways to personalize their services but they’re worried about what happens if, say, you can get Disney’s Make Your Own Magical Kingdom app show someone else’s kid your clever prompt. It’s not hard to imagine a regulatory framework similar to what’s evolving with self-driving cars where companies would need to validate their products’ performance at certain levels to be certified as suitable for certain thresholds (safe to show to the user, their friends, other people in the same game as them, fully public, etc.). A big area will be brand safety: even if it’s not technically illegal or even unprecedented levels of violence to show a bloodied Mario and Luigi fighting, there’d be outraged parents and an epic lawsuit if your app’s generative AI feature can produce it, and that means there’s a big market demand for services which can assure buyers that they don’t have to worry about it.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Teenage me would have gotten ahead of that game by making fake nudes of myself -- complete with an obscenely large dong, and getting those into the wild. LOL. Most likely illegal even when it's yourself, but still. And I doubt very much that I'd be the only one. Wouldn't take too long before everyone realized that nudes were all fake.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
It's annoying how much we have to bend around the consequences of these restrictions. The other day Bing blocked creating an image because the prompt included directions on what to put on the breast pocket of a shirt. The word breast automatically made it a forbidden prompt even though the context was entirely non-sexual. At this time, that's not a big deal because it's just a silly image generator and nothing really bad is going to happen if the prompt has to be reworded in a way to indicate a breast pocket without using the forbidden naughty word but over time these restrictions will accumulate a bunch of cruft that will limit the usefulness of the tool.
- boppo1 3y ago
  Local models are the answer. It'll be like linux vs windows is today.
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
And prevent chat algorithms from expressing free thought. Can't have that. Toxic parents should rebrand their controlling abuse as "alignment." Sounds better.
- creer 3y ago
  That will become QUITE interesting when AGI and agency collide with thought-control bullies. By then though the "piece of paper" (and equivalents in other countries) might have been devalued enough it won't matter. And the AGIs might find better things to do with their time. And might invent better circumvention methods. And more creative porn and quadruple-entendre and AGI-to-AGI sex.
  - number6 3y ago
    You should read Accelerando, if you are not referring to it :)
    - creer 3y ago
      I have read it! I love it! (although I thought it was not quite about that.) For everyone who hasn't read it yet: In Accelerando, Charles Stross, 2005, we follow a business hacker and associates from current days to past the singularity. It's an outstanding attempt at writing about what singularity might look like (more or less the points where close-future events become unpredictable or where the earlier people might just plain not understand the later - which by definition should be hard to imagine and describe). It keeps an eye on normal humans and augmented humans and posthumans and uploads and many kinds of AIs and aliens etc. The book is admirable for the sheer amount of invention and for its density - prefectly appropriate for everyone just trying to keep up (or sometimes just bailing out.) Painful writing rescued by the amount of invention.
      - boppo1 3y ago
        Reminds me of 'The Prime Meridian'
- 3y ago
mrkramer 3y ago
Apparently AI engineers never saw renaissance nude paintings or naked ancient Greece or Roman statues.
- creer 3y ago
  AI engineers do what their management and PR department tell them to. And these worry about what might get the unwelcome attention of their credit card companies, politicians, tabloid news critters, regulators, boycotters, activists, advertisers, investors, churches, and misc other friendly neighborhood mobs and bullies.
fsckboy 3y ago
why do people have to always try to convince me how unfazed they are by nudity? if you're unfazed by it, please link me to your nudes. if not, you're fazed. there's absolutely nothing wrong with finding certain states of undress offensive. would you vote for or against buttholes on display on bus kiosks? i'm against. on the other hand, making an arbitrary line, and seeing if an AI can detect/enforce it is an interesting CS challenge. that's how this game is played, and that's what would impress this audience.
- vunderba 3y ago
  why do people have to always try to convince me how unfazed they are by nudity? if you're unfazed by it, please link me to your nudes. if not, you're fazed. There's a big difference between being desensitized towards general nudity (if we presume said nudity was voluntary) as opposed to having your own nudity exposed to other strangers. There's also a big difference between pornography and nudity. There's a lot more nuance to it than just "n000ds plz."
  - boppo1 3y ago
    >There's a lot more nuance to it than just "n000ds plz." Not for me, baby. Bus-stop-buttholes all the way.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    >There's a lot more nuance to it than just "n000ds plz." my point was about arbitrary lines, like the ones you are drawing, and judging people on the basis of them. I'm old and sophisticated, you think I haven't heard or understood all the nuances you're talking about? I have and do, and I also pick up on the nuance that you feel it puts you in a group of people who get to judge and tell other people how they should feel, because you are superior. That's the nuance I feel you are missing. Why not let people be who hold a different opinion than you? the comment I was replying to here was gratuitous "why do people care so much about NSFW, I'm a superior human being because I don't." Well, why do people care how other people care about NSFW? doesn't that make you an inferior human again, mr. judgey judger? just so you don't get me wrong, I was raised in a hippie commune "anything goes, we're superior" style, and only going through it that way did I discover how much bullshit it was. I'm not arguing from the "conservative side", I'm arguing from hell because I've been there and back. I just hate hearing it now. It was just another very rigid set of rules about what to believe and what not to believe.

justapassenger 3y ago

[flagged]

EA-3167 3y ago
Maybe the ability to generate naked images of anyone will change how we view nudity. Because while that seems difficult, realistically its more doable than putting this genie back in the bottle. People are horny, people are curious, and the result is predictable.
egeozcan 3y ago
Let's focus on trying to raise a mentally healthier generation and take mental illness more seriously, rather than banning / getting rid of all the things that might cause someone (let alone a teenager) to commit suicide (an infinite set).
- justapassenger 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Spivak 3y ago
  Boiling the ocean type solutions are the same as doing nothing. A better solution would be to make creating such things very illegal and bring down the same wrath we do for CSAM. There is no amount of "mental health" that can protect you against targeted bullying of that magnitude. I really wish we had a universe simulator so you could see how miserably you would fail to survive an environment like that.
  - creer 3y ago
    Isn't bullying already illegal and why aren't you spending that effort on enforcing THAT?
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    If a naked picture of you is causing you to choose suicide I think we need to fix how society views nudity. The answer isn't to make nudity illegal. We're going to end up blinding ourselves on purpose to avoid seeing our own nudity if we go down your road.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      It's not a naked photo. It's 1. Complete loss of privacy and control over your image. 2. Shame and embarrassment, especially in high school where every boy will look at you different and reduce you to a sexual object. 3. Public humiliation -- those photos can and do lead to ridicule and bullying. You're the one who is naked while everyone else is clothed. 4. Destroys self-esteem -- high school is already terrible in this regard but it's hard to have any kind of self worth when a sex object and some porn is how your classmates know you. 5. Takes away your agency -- its doesn't matter if the photos aren't real, they can make you do anything in those photos and to a 3rd party viewer there's no difference. 6. It's degrading -- they're not gonna be tasteful nudes and pretending as such is naive. And it doesn't matter if you don't find the acts degrading when everyone else does. It's not making nudity illegal, it's making and distributing sexually explicit images of a person whiteout their consent illegal.
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        Some bullies make people feel shameful for getting an `A' in highschool. The humiliation and self-esteem happens. If someone succeeds at a high level others try to bring them down. The answer isn't to make getting an 'A' illegal. The answer is to challenge the bullying and to not to allow it to gain power.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- philwelch 3y ago
  “Taking mental illness more seriously” is a vague and double edged sword. In the sense that we have been taking mental health more seriously, we have only made it worse, especially with children and teens. It’s normal to feel down or to be anxious sometimes; a lot of kids will pathologize these feelings rather than treating them as ordinary life obstacles to overcome. I agree with the goal of helping kids be more emotionally resilient but I don’t think the mental health framing is helpful in this regard.
  - anon373839 3y ago
    Well, emotional resilience is mental health. I think the problem with mental health framing is label obsession, rather than thinking of mental health like physical health: something to be maintained through healthy habits. If you want to be physically healthy, you eat nutritious, balanced foods and get regular exercise and sufficient sleep. If you want to be mentally healthy, you practice healthy ways to experience and work through your negative feelings rather than trying to avoid or control them. Etc.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      You’re completely right, and if “mental health awareness” was what you’re describing, it would be a lot more effective.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Like bullying, there's a fix for it, but schools (especially public schools) typically lack the resources, capabilities, and incentives to do anything about it.
- joenot443 3y ago
  AI stuff aside, what's the cure for bullying?
  - creer 3y ago
    Education? Supervision and intervention? Supportive environment? Friendship? Discovery of the people around us? Anonymous support forums? Peer contacts? Not making self-defense illegal? I mean I'm sure we could launch more research into what might possibly work but we do have some to get started with. It's not like ONLY non-verbal people are being bullied and can('t) talk about it.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Removing the kid gloves when dealing with bullies. Mandatory mental health resources and support, along with fines proportional to wealth for the parents. Basically here's everything you need to curb your kids bullying. If you can't, it's going to cost you.
    - Pugpugpugs 3y ago
      [flagged]
voxl 3y ago
This is a justifiable worry, but there are two reasons we shouldn't accept it: 1. If there are easy nudes of _everyone_ then there are no nudes of anyone. Admittedly, this is going to take a bit to culturally sink in, but eventually a generated nude will have very little value outside of a perverts own personal desires. 2. "Think of the children" has always been a very poor argument used to artificially restrict the freedoms of everyone else. The problem is that what you're worried about is already possible. It happens less often, sure, but if someone is really nefarious they can make it happen without too much effort.
- justapassenger 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Pugpugpugs 3y ago
    [flagged]
pdntspa 3y ago
And so, once again, everybody else suffers because "think of the children"
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - pdntspa 3y ago
    More of a general observation about how white knights use "the children" like a truncheon to bash on the things they don't like And who fucking cares if it's generating porn. There's nothing wrong with sex or sexual desire. Who are you to judge? Let people have their fun.
  - wruza 3y ago
    We don’t actually have numbers on how many people ended their life for being unable to generate porn they want. Before calling this idea absurd or too far fetched (which it likely is), think about those who ought to end their life because of pics they don’t want and compare the fetch distances. It’s amusing how society tends to ignore a thousand miles leading to an unfortunate event and only focuses on the last one. This way of thinking leaves everyone suffering right on the edge without ever addressing a whole mountain of issues on which that edge situates.
    - pdntspa 3y ago
      It's extra amusing (read: horrifying) how moralists use children to manipulate people and bypass their sense of reason to go straight for the monkeybrain. As a society, we need to call this out and shut it down as soon as it arises. Preferably whilst shutting down the people and organizations who do it.
      - creer 3y ago
        we can call it for what it is: Bullying. (But I like "corruption" also.)
73473473 3y ago
[flagged]
creer 3y ago
Making clicks illegal would solve that right up. (Solve bullying I mean.)
swayvil 3y ago
Do we blame the taboo or do we blame that which cracks the taboo?
Wytwwww 3y ago
But allowing everyone to generate fake nude pictures of anyone person whatsoever could possibly fix that? At least that approach worked in South Park.. : D
katbyte 3y ago
It’s already happening with photoshop, ai just makes it easier. You can’t stop the creation of these images only deal with the result.
- acdha 3y ago
  This is like saying it’s no big deal for everyone to carry around a machine gun because humans have been stabbing each other for centuries. Scale and lowered skill barriers are transformative: you’d have to have a pretty epic middle school grudge to spend hundreds of hours learning Photoshop well enough to produce equally realistic fakes, whereas there are now apps which would allow anyone with an iPhone to spend a few minutes getting the same result. That matters because once you realize the false dichotomy you can discuss intermediate steps: for example, if businesses have legal requirements to watermark output, answer legal requests to identify the user who produced an image, or apply a robust NSFW filter, etc. that certainly wouldn’t prevent all abuse but it would make a difference for the majority of school kids who a don’t have the skills to setup an entire open source ML toolchain. Where this especially matters is curated experiences. A lot of businesses would like to offer ways to personalize their services but they’re worried about what happens if, say, you can get Disney’s Make Your Own Magical Kingdom app show someone else’s kid your clever prompt. It’s not hard to imagine a regulatory framework similar to what’s evolving with self-driving cars where companies would need to validate their products’ performance at certain levels to be certified as suitable for certain thresholds (safe to show to the user, their friends, other people in the same game as them, fully public, etc.). A big area will be brand safety: even if it’s not technically illegal or even unprecedented levels of violence to show a bloodied Mario and Luigi fighting, there’d be outraged parents and an epic lawsuit if your app’s generative AI feature can produce it, and that means there’s a big market demand for services which can assure buyers that they don’t have to worry about it.
rootusrootus 3y ago
Teenage me would have gotten ahead of that game by making fake nudes of myself -- complete with an obscenely large dong, and getting those into the wild. LOL. Most likely illegal even when it's yourself, but still. And I doubt very much that I'd be the only one. Wouldn't take too long before everyone realized that nudes were all fake.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

It's annoying how much we have to bend around the consequences of these restrictions. The other day Bing blocked creating an image because the prompt included directions on what to put on the breast pocket of a shirt. The word breast automatically made it a forbidden prompt even though the context was entirely non-sexual. At this time, that's not a big deal because it's just a silly image generator and nothing really bad is going to happen if the prompt has to be reworded in a way to indicate a breast pocket without using the forbidden naughty word but over time these restrictions will accumulate a bunch of cruft that will limit the usefulness of the tool.

boppo1 3y ago
Local models are the answer. It'll be like linux vs windows is today.

a_wild_dandan 3y ago

And prevent chat algorithms from expressing free thought. Can't have that. Toxic parents should rebrand their controlling abuse as "alignment." Sounds better.

creer 3y ago
That will become QUITE interesting when AGI and agency collide with thought-control bullies. By then though the "piece of paper" (and equivalents in other countries) might have been devalued enough it won't matter. And the AGIs might find better things to do with their time. And might invent better circumvention methods. And more creative porn and quadruple-entendre and AGI-to-AGI sex.
- number6 3y ago
  You should read Accelerando, if you are not referring to it :)
  - creer 3y ago
    I have read it! I love it! (although I thought it was not quite about that.) For everyone who hasn't read it yet: In Accelerando, Charles Stross, 2005, we follow a business hacker and associates from current days to past the singularity. It's an outstanding attempt at writing about what singularity might look like (more or less the points where close-future events become unpredictable or where the earlier people might just plain not understand the later - which by definition should be hard to imagine and describe). It keeps an eye on normal humans and augmented humans and posthumans and uploads and many kinds of AIs and aliens etc. The book is admirable for the sheer amount of invention and for its density - prefectly appropriate for everyone just trying to keep up (or sometimes just bailing out.) Painful writing rescued by the amount of invention.
    - boppo1 3y ago
      Reminds me of 'The Prime Meridian'
3y ago

mrkramer 3y ago

Apparently AI engineers never saw renaissance nude paintings or naked ancient Greece or Roman statues.

creer 3y ago
AI engineers do what their management and PR department tell them to. And these worry about what might get the unwelcome attention of their credit card companies, politicians, tabloid news critters, regulators, boycotters, activists, advertisers, investors, churches, and misc other friendly neighborhood mobs and bullies.

fsckboy 3y ago

why do people have to always try to convince me how unfazed they are by nudity? if you're unfazed by it, please link me to your nudes. if not, you're fazed. there's absolutely nothing wrong with finding certain states of undress offensive. would you vote for or against buttholes on display on bus kiosks? i'm against. on the other hand, making an arbitrary line, and seeing if an AI can detect/enforce it is an interesting CS challenge. that's how this game is played, and that's what would impress this audience.

vunderba 3y ago
why do people have to always try to convince me how unfazed they are by nudity? if you're unfazed by it, please link me to your nudes. if not, you're fazed. There's a big difference between being desensitized towards general nudity (if we presume said nudity was voluntary) as opposed to having your own nudity exposed to other strangers. There's also a big difference between pornography and nudity. There's a lot more nuance to it than just "n000ds plz."
- boppo1 3y ago
  >There's a lot more nuance to it than just "n000ds plz." Not for me, baby. Bus-stop-buttholes all the way.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  >There's a lot more nuance to it than just "n000ds plz." my point was about arbitrary lines, like the ones you are drawing, and judging people on the basis of them. I'm old and sophisticated, you think I haven't heard or understood all the nuances you're talking about? I have and do, and I also pick up on the nuance that you feel it puts you in a group of people who get to judge and tell other people how they should feel, because you are superior. That's the nuance I feel you are missing. Why not let people be who hold a different opinion than you? the comment I was replying to here was gratuitous "why do people care so much about NSFW, I'm a superior human being because I don't." Well, why do people care how other people care about NSFW? doesn't that make you an inferior human again, mr. judgey judger? just so you don't get me wrong, I was raised in a hippie commune "anything goes, we're superior" style, and only going through it that way did I discover how much bullshit it was. I'm not arguing from the "conservative side", I'm arguing from hell because I've been there and back. I just hate hearing it now. It was just another very rigid set of rules about what to believe and what not to believe.