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I don't think the problem is watching synthetic images. The problem is generating them based off actual people and sharing them on the internet in a way that th

I don't think the problem is watching synthetic images. The problem is generating them based off actual people and sharing them on the internet in a way that the people watching can't tell the difference anymore. This was already somewhat of a problem with Photoshop and once everyone with zero skills can do it in seconds and with far better quality, it will become a nightmare.

deleted 3y ago
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725686 3y ago
We are already there, you can no longer trust any image or video you see, so what is the point? Bad actors will still be able to create fake images and videos as they already do. Limiting it for the average user is stupid.
- mplewis 3y ago
  You guys know you can just draw porn, right?
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Generating porn is easier and cheaper. You don’t have to spend the time learning to draw naked bodies, which can be substantial. (The joke being that serious drawers go through the draw naked model sessions a lot, but it isn’t porn)
    - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      > but it isn’t porn In my experience with 2D artists, studying porn is one of their favorite forms of naked model practice.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        The models art schools get for naked drawing sessions usually aren’t that attractive, definitely not at a porn ideal. The objective is to learn the body, not become aroused. There is a lot of (mostly non realistic) porn that comes out of art school students via the skills they gain.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  We are not actually there yet. First, you still need some technical understanding and a somewhat decent setup to run these models yourself without the guardrails. So the average greasy dude who wants to share HD porn based on your daugther's linkedin profile pic on nsfw subreddits still has too many hoops to jump through. Right now you can also still spot AI images pretty easily, if you know what to look for. Especially for previous stable diffusion models. But all of this could change very soon.
Salgat 3y ago
I'll challenge this idea and say that once it becomes ubiquitous, it actually does more good than harm. Things like revenge porn become pointless if there's no way to prove it's even real, and I have yet to ever see deep fakes of porn amount to anything.
idle_zealot 3y ago
> once everyone with zero skills can do it in seconds and with far better quality, it will become a nightmare. Will it be a nightmare? If it becomes so easy and common that anyone can do it, then surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0. That loss of trust presents problems, but not ones that "safe" AI can solve.
- foobarian 3y ago
  Arguably that loss of trust would be a net positive.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  >surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0 Maybe, eventually. But we don't know how long it will take (or if it will happen at all). And the time until then will be a nightmare for every single woman out there who has any sort of profile picture on any website. Just look at how celebrity deepfakes got reddit into trouble even though their generation was vastly more complex and you could still clearly tell that the videos were fake. Now imagine everyone can suddenly post undetectable nude selfies of your girlfriend on nsfw subreddits. Even if people eventually catch on, that first shock will be unavoidable.
  - jquery 3y ago
    The tide is rolling in and we have two options... yell at the tide really loud that we were here first and we shouldn't have to move... or get out of the way. I'm a lot more sympathetic to the latter option myself.
  - swatcoder 3y ago
    Your anxiety dream relies on there currently being some technical bottleneck limiting the creation or spread of embarassing fake nudes as a way of cyberbullying. I don't see any evidence of that. What I see is that people who want to embarass and bully others are already fully enabled to do so, and do so. It seems more likely to me and many of us that the bottleneck that stops it from being worse is simply that only so many people think it's reasonable or satisfying to distribute embarassing fake nudes of someone. Society already shuns it and it's not that effective as a way of bullying and embarassing people, so only so many people are moved to bother. Assuming that the hyped up new product is due to swoop in and disrupt the cyberbullying "industry" is just a classic technologist's fantasy. It ignores all the boring realities of actual human behavior, social norms, and secure equilibriums, etc; skips any evidence building or research effort; and just presumes that some new technology is just sooooo powerful that none of that prior ground truth stuff matters. I get why people who think that way might be on HN or in some Silicon Valley circles, but it can be one of the eyeroll-inducing vices of these communities as much as it can be one of its motivational virtues.
monitorlizard 3y ago
Perhaps I'm being overly contrarian, but from my point of view, I feel that could be a blessing in disguise. For example, in a world where deepfake pornography is ubiquitous, it becomes much harder to tarnish someone's reputation through revenge porn, real or fake. I'm reminded of Syndrome from The Incredibles: "When everyone is super no one will be."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fimdomeio 3y ago
The censuring of porn content exists for PR reasons. They just want to have a way to say "we tried to prevent it". If anyone wants to generate porn, then it just needs 30 min of research to find the huge amount of models based on stable diffusion with nsfw content. If you can generate synthetic images and have a channel to broadcast them, then you could generate way bigger problems then fake celebrity porn. Not saying that it is not a problem, but rather that it is a problem inherent to the whole tool, not to some specific subjects.
boringuser2 3y ago
If that ever becomes an actual problem, our entire society will be at a filter point. This is the problem with these kind of incremental mitigations philosophically -- as soon as the actual problem were to manifest it would instantly become a civilization-level threat that would only be resolved with drastic restructuring of society. Same logic for an AI that replaces a programmer. As soon as AI is that advanced the problem requires vast changes. Incremental mitigations don't do anything.
cooper_ganglia 3y ago
I watched an old Tom Scott video of him predicting what the distant year 2030 would look like. In his talk, he mentioned privacy becoming something quaint that your grandparents used to believe in. I’ve wondered for a while if we just adapt to the point that we’re unfazed by fake nude photos of people. The recent Bobbi Althoff “leaks” reminded me of this. That’s a little different since she’s a public figure, but I really wonder if we just go into the future assuming all photos like that have been faked, and if someone’s iCloud gets leaked now it’ll actually be less stressful because 1. They can claim it’s AI images, or 2. There’s already lewd AI images of them, so the real ones leaking don’t really make much of a difference.
- flir 3y ago
  There's an argument that privacy (more accurately anonymity) is a temporary phenomenon, a consequence of the scale that comes with industrialization. We didn't really have it in small villages, and we won't really have it in the global village. (I'm not a fan of the direction, but then I'm a product of stage 2).
Szpadel 3y ago
serious question, is that really that hard to remove personal information from training data so model does not know how specific public figures look like? I believe this worked with nudity and model when asked generated "smooth" intimate regions (like some kind of doll) so you could ask for eg. generic president but not any specific one, so it would be very hard to generate anyone specific
- amenhotep 3y ago
  Proprietary, inaccessible models can somewhat do that. Locally hosted models can simply be trained on what a specific person looks like by the user, you just need a couple dozen photos. Keyword: LoRA.
fennecbutt 3y ago
But just like privacy issues, this'll be possible. It's only bad because society still hasn't normalised sex, from a gay perspective y'all are prude af. It's a shortcut, for us to just accept that these social ideals and expectations will have to change so we may as well do it now. In 100 years, people will be able to make a personal AI that looks, sounds and behaves like any person they want and does anything they want. We'll have thinking dust, you can already buy cameras like a mm^2, in the future I imagine they'll be even smaller. At some point it's going to get increasingly unproductive trying to safeguard technology without people's social expectations changing. Same thing with Google Glass, shunned pretttty much exclusively bc it has a camera on it (even tho phones at the time did too), but now we got Ray Bans camera glasses and 50 years from now all glasses will have cameras, if we even still wear them.
- spazx 3y ago
  Yes this. This is what I've been trying to explain to my friends. When Tron came out in 1982, it was disliked because back then using CGI effects was considered "cheating". Then awhile later Pixar did movies entirely with CGI and they were hits. Now almost every big studio movie uses CGI. Shunned to embraced in like, 13 years. I think over time the general consensus's views about AI models will soften. Although it might take longer in some communities. (Username checks out lol, furry here also. I think the furs may take longer to embrace it.) (Also, people will still continue to use older tools like Photoshop to accomplish similar things.)
  - fennecbutt 3y ago
    Yes many furs I know are very anti AI art etc, including overreacting to how "bad" it looks, though if I hadn't told em it was AI generated I don't think they'd have the same reaction. Ironic, since so many furs are in tech, but we all have artist friends I suppose. People just forget that portrait painters were put out of business by photographers, and traditional artists were put out of business by digital artists. And so the cycle and the luddism repeats.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

725686 3y ago

We are already there, you can no longer trust any image or video you see, so what is the point? Bad actors will still be able to create fake images and videos as they already do. Limiting it for the average user is stupid.

mplewis 3y ago
You guys know you can just draw porn, right?
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Generating porn is easier and cheaper. You don’t have to spend the time learning to draw naked bodies, which can be substantial. (The joke being that serious drawers go through the draw naked model sessions a lot, but it isn’t porn)
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    > but it isn’t porn In my experience with 2D artists, studying porn is one of their favorite forms of naked model practice.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      The models art schools get for naked drawing sessions usually aren’t that attractive, definitely not at a porn ideal. The objective is to learn the body, not become aroused. There is a lot of (mostly non realistic) porn that comes out of art school students via the skills they gain.
sigmoid10 3y ago
We are not actually there yet. First, you still need some technical understanding and a somewhat decent setup to run these models yourself without the guardrails. So the average greasy dude who wants to share HD porn based on your daugther's linkedin profile pic on nsfw subreddits still has too many hoops to jump through. Right now you can also still spot AI images pretty easily, if you know what to look for. Especially for previous stable diffusion models. But all of this could change very soon.

Salgat 3y ago

I'll challenge this idea and say that once it becomes ubiquitous, it actually does more good than harm. Things like revenge porn become pointless if there's no way to prove it's even real, and I have yet to ever see deep fakes of porn amount to anything.

idle_zealot 3y ago

> once everyone with zero skills can do it in seconds and with far better quality, it will become a nightmare. Will it be a nightmare? If it becomes so easy and common that anyone can do it, then surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0. That loss of trust presents problems, but not ones that "safe" AI can solve.

foobarian 3y ago
Arguably that loss of trust would be a net positive.
sigmoid10 3y ago
>surely trust in the veracity of damaging images will drop to about 0 Maybe, eventually. But we don't know how long it will take (or if it will happen at all). And the time until then will be a nightmare for every single woman out there who has any sort of profile picture on any website. Just look at how celebrity deepfakes got reddit into trouble even though their generation was vastly more complex and you could still clearly tell that the videos were fake. Now imagine everyone can suddenly post undetectable nude selfies of your girlfriend on nsfw subreddits. Even if people eventually catch on, that first shock will be unavoidable.
- jquery 3y ago
  The tide is rolling in and we have two options... yell at the tide really loud that we were here first and we shouldn't have to move... or get out of the way. I'm a lot more sympathetic to the latter option myself.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  Your anxiety dream relies on there currently being some technical bottleneck limiting the creation or spread of embarassing fake nudes as a way of cyberbullying. I don't see any evidence of that. What I see is that people who want to embarass and bully others are already fully enabled to do so, and do so. It seems more likely to me and many of us that the bottleneck that stops it from being worse is simply that only so many people think it's reasonable or satisfying to distribute embarassing fake nudes of someone. Society already shuns it and it's not that effective as a way of bullying and embarassing people, so only so many people are moved to bother. Assuming that the hyped up new product is due to swoop in and disrupt the cyberbullying "industry" is just a classic technologist's fantasy. It ignores all the boring realities of actual human behavior, social norms, and secure equilibriums, etc; skips any evidence building or research effort; and just presumes that some new technology is just sooooo powerful that none of that prior ground truth stuff matters. I get why people who think that way might be on HN or in some Silicon Valley circles, but it can be one of the eyeroll-inducing vices of these communities as much as it can be one of its motivational virtues.

monitorlizard 3y ago

Perhaps I'm being overly contrarian, but from my point of view, I feel that could be a blessing in disguise. For example, in a world where deepfake pornography is ubiquitous, it becomes much harder to tarnish someone's reputation through revenge porn, real or fake. I'm reminded of Syndrome from The Incredibles: "When everyone is super no one will be."

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fimdomeio 3y ago

The censuring of porn content exists for PR reasons. They just want to have a way to say "we tried to prevent it". If anyone wants to generate porn, then it just needs 30 min of research to find the huge amount of models based on stable diffusion with nsfw content. If you can generate synthetic images and have a channel to broadcast them, then you could generate way bigger problems then fake celebrity porn. Not saying that it is not a problem, but rather that it is a problem inherent to the whole tool, not to some specific subjects.

boringuser2 3y ago

If that ever becomes an actual problem, our entire society will be at a filter point. This is the problem with these kind of incremental mitigations philosophically -- as soon as the actual problem were to manifest it would instantly become a civilization-level threat that would only be resolved with drastic restructuring of society. Same logic for an AI that replaces a programmer. As soon as AI is that advanced the problem requires vast changes. Incremental mitigations don't do anything.

cooper_ganglia 3y ago

I watched an old Tom Scott video of him predicting what the distant year 2030 would look like. In his talk, he mentioned privacy becoming something quaint that your grandparents used to believe in. I’ve wondered for a while if we just adapt to the point that we’re unfazed by fake nude photos of people. The recent Bobbi Althoff “leaks” reminded me of this. That’s a little different since she’s a public figure, but I really wonder if we just go into the future assuming all photos like that have been faked, and if someone’s iCloud gets leaked now it’ll actually be less stressful because 1. They can claim it’s AI images, or 2. There’s already lewd AI images of them, so the real ones leaking don’t really make much of a difference.

flir 3y ago
There's an argument that privacy (more accurately anonymity) is a temporary phenomenon, a consequence of the scale that comes with industrialization. We didn't really have it in small villages, and we won't really have it in the global village. (I'm not a fan of the direction, but then I'm a product of stage 2).

Szpadel 3y ago

serious question, is that really that hard to remove personal information from training data so model does not know how specific public figures look like? I believe this worked with nudity and model when asked generated "smooth" intimate regions (like some kind of doll) so you could ask for eg. generic president but not any specific one, so it would be very hard to generate anyone specific

amenhotep 3y ago
Proprietary, inaccessible models can somewhat do that. Locally hosted models can simply be trained on what a specific person looks like by the user, you just need a couple dozen photos. Keyword: LoRA.

fennecbutt 3y ago

But just like privacy issues, this'll be possible. It's only bad because society still hasn't normalised sex, from a gay perspective y'all are prude af. It's a shortcut, for us to just accept that these social ideals and expectations will have to change so we may as well do it now. In 100 years, people will be able to make a personal AI that looks, sounds and behaves like any person they want and does anything they want. We'll have thinking dust, you can already buy cameras like a mm^2, in the future I imagine they'll be even smaller. At some point it's going to get increasingly unproductive trying to safeguard technology without people's social expectations changing. Same thing with Google Glass, shunned pretttty much exclusively bc it has a camera on it (even tho phones at the time did too), but now we got Ray Bans camera glasses and 50 years from now all glasses will have cameras, if we even still wear them.

spazx 3y ago
Yes this. This is what I've been trying to explain to my friends. When Tron came out in 1982, it was disliked because back then using CGI effects was considered "cheating". Then awhile later Pixar did movies entirely with CGI and they were hits. Now almost every big studio movie uses CGI. Shunned to embraced in like, 13 years. I think over time the general consensus's views about AI models will soften. Although it might take longer in some communities. (Username checks out lol, furry here also. I think the furs may take longer to embrace it.) (Also, people will still continue to use older tools like Photoshop to accomplish similar things.)
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  Yes many furs I know are very anti AI art etc, including overreacting to how "bad" it looks, though if I hadn't told em it was AI generated I don't think they'd have the same reaction. Ironic, since so many furs are in tech, but we all have artist friends I suppose. People just forget that portrait painters were put out of business by photographers, and traditional artists were put out of business by digital artists. And so the cycle and the luddism repeats.