13 ms·

Washington's Lottery forced to pull site after creating AI porn of lotto user

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• perihelions 3y ago
  I think regardless of the specifics, using generative AI to manipulate people into gambling is predatory and immoral. It's psychological abuse to manipulate people into dwelling on how their lives are awful, and on how purchasing the advertised product could fix all their lifelong problems (which it almost certainly won't). Some of the worst "abuses of AI" are going to be things we've already fully normalized—we just fail to reflect adequately on our culture and in what ways it's broken.
  • ethbr1 3y ago
    Generative AI is fundamentally "more volume" than anything else. > Some of the worst "abuses of AI" are going to be things we've already fully normalized In this case, I can't see more advertisement substantially altering the experience. Possibly micro-targeted images? But is that really going to change the net effect of advertising?
  • SamBam 3y ago
    While you're right, the AI part is almost irrelevant. I think it's immoral that states can advertise their lotteries full-stop. True, the AI part will make this worse, especially if states get into really targeted advertisements. But the morality line is already being crossed daily.
    • JTbane 3y ago
      I don't have a problem with state lotteries because it's essentially charity towards public works. You could argue that the gambling aspect makes it addictive, but it's basically entertainment.
      • vouaobrasil 3y ago
        Well, there is a fine line betweeen entertainment and a drug. That is precisely what makes entertainment so protected by modern governments and corporations: they know where that line is, and how to cross it.
      • walthamstow 3y ago
        A massively profitable charity towards public works funded exclusively by poor and lower-middle working people who are addicted to waiting for their numbers each week
      • nerdjon 3y ago
        I would buy this argument until they advertise it. Everyone knows what the lottery is, there is basically zero reason to do any advertising for it. Advertising it is encouraging addictive behavior. I think it is fine that the state runs it, but not the way that many do. It being a charity doesn't absolve them from bad behavior, plenty of charities have been... controversial.
    • vouaobrasil 3y ago
      > While you're right, the AI part is almost irrelevant. I think it's immoral that states can advertise their lotteries full-stop. Well, it does highlight the fact that AI will make this sort of manipulation so much easier and faster. Imagine a world where there the only vehicles are bicycles and people crash frequently. Now, the first car is introduced and someone crashes at 100MPH -- would you really say that the car is irrelevant to the situation because people have been crashing for decades? Yes, you are right: the root problem is the way we view people's minds as a resource to be exploited through psychological manipulation, but that does not make irrelevant the very real new danger of AI.
      • ToucanLoucan 3y ago
        > would you really say that the car is irrelevant to the situation because people have been crashing for decades? The tragic irony being that's basically what we did and continue to do.
        • jprete 3y ago
          I understand why you might say that - particularly at a societal level - but individual drivers: * Must be licensed * Must have a minimum level of liability insurance that covers other participants in an accident * Can be fined, get higher insurance premiums, and lose their licenses for breaking driving laws * Can be put in jail for felonies for sufficiently reckless driving that has the potential to endanger others As I understand it, commercially licensed drivers usually have even higher requirements and lose their licenses more easily for driving infractions. GenAI makes a lot of creative actions much easier, faster, automatable, and available to everyone, and "everyone" includes a lot of people with no foresight or discipline whatsoever.
          • Swizec 3y ago
            None of this was true when cars were first introduced. Back in the early 20th century it was considered fairly normal that drivers would just sort of plow through pedestrians if they’re in the way. Big societal battle over who gets to be in streets – the people who have always been there, or the cars. Eventually jaywalking was invented as a concept by the car lobby. > And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern...
    • dhosek 3y ago
      Worse still, because it’s a state-run lottery, it’s not subject to truth in advertising laws so they can advertise the jackpot that you would receive over 30 years as if it were the lump sum payment that you’d receive for winning.
      • robin_reala 3y ago
        Why are they not subject to those laws?
    • verisimi 3y ago
      Its one thing for a human to pay another human to call up leads or whatever, and an entirely other thing to create a factory to do the same job and hit thousands/millions at a lower cost than someone would pay the single human. The scale difference is significant, albeit I also agree that neither is moral.
    • hackerlight 3y ago
      I go further than this. It's immoral to weaponize someone's evolved dopamine system against their own long-term interests. Whether that's fast food, alcohol, social media, loot boxes or gambling. It's fine to have products in these loose categories, but we've clearly gone overboard when people are fat and depressed because their evolved circuits have been so thoroughly hacked like moths to a flame. At some point we're no longer in the paradigm of voluntary consumer choice.
      • apantel 3y ago
        That’s… most media, most products, most services.
        • hamburga 3y ago
          Exactly :/ Not illegal, but immoral
        • hackerlight 3y ago
          That's forcing things into an artificial binary when it's more appropriate to think of it as a spectrum, with unambiguously aligned products (e.g whole foods that improve user health) on the one hand and unambiguously exploitative products (e.g krokodil) on the other.
      • logicchains 3y ago
        >when people are fat and depressed because their evolved circuits have been so thoroughly hacked like moths to a flame People in America are fat and depressed because of a culture of looking to blame biology for poor self control rather than take responsibility for their own behaviour. Advertising is just as much of a thing in East Asia but it doesn't have the obesity problem that the west has, because there it's regarded as a personal failing. Advertisement was just as much a thing in America 50 years ago as it is now, but people weren't fat and depressed then, because people were told to take responsibility for their diet and their state of mind. Willpower is like a muscle, it's been proven to strengthen with use. Letting people get away with blaming advertisement, biology or whatever for their failures prevents them ever needing to develop their willpower.
    • diydsp 3y ago
      > immoral that states can advertise their lotteries full-stop. State lotteries are a compromise: They inhibit underground lotteries. The goal of the state lotteries is to divert people away from the danger of the underground while keeping itself from being overly attractive.
      • edgyquant 3y ago
        Why do they need to be state controlled for this? This is the same argument for casinos but states don’t run those.
        • Err_Eek 3y ago
          > This is the same argument for casinos but states don’t run those. In most (or at least a lot of) countries states regulate casinos _so much_ than it becomes almost a technicality that casinos are privately owned. Also with lotteries you have the scale factor -- in order to have an attractive lottery, you need a ton of ticket buyers, so if you have a national level lottery you can definitely make neighborhood lotteries way less appealing. Blackjack and poker tables don't scale the same way.
      • whiterknight 3y ago
        We have seen how well this argument holds up with sports betting, which went from something people do in Vegas on vacation to a significant portion of 20-30 year old males pay checks. Accessibility and marketing matters.
        • iamthirsty 3y ago
          I don't know where you grew up, but in almost every college guy's social network (usually already consisting of sports guys) we all knew a guy and didn't just bet in Vegas on vacation. It has always been a significant part of 20-30 yo male paychecks, now it's just acceptable to advertise on ESPN.
          • noolean 3y ago
    • Intermernet 3y ago
      Can I take this a step further and say that advertising is the true problem here? I tend to think most things should be legal, but advertising most things should be banned. It seems that society can't delineate between accepting a practice and promoting a practice.
      • bartonfink 3y ago
        Pot, meet kettle.
      • Fubarberry 3y ago
        What would you recommend as an alternative to advertisements? I do think a lot of ads go too far, but I think some form of advertisement is necessary to get new awareness of new brands and products. Otherwise only the pre-established large brands and products will ever get sales, which would lead to a lack of competition and all the negatives that come with that.
        • n4r9 3y ago
          In a civilised society, among other regulations, advertisements would be shown only to people that have pro-actively searched for a service or product.
          • stuart73547373 3y ago
            this would be great if everyone was rich enough to afford to pay for their services with money. but it would cut off a lot of services and opportunities for everyone else who is able to pay with their attention (to ads) instead
            • secstate 3y ago
              I mean, we're basically heading towards a basic minimum income at that point, where you truncate the top 5% of the tax ladder and redistribute it to the bottom 25%. At that point, people could pay for services. Dig a little into the idea that people can "pay" with their attention (and with their poor health, crappy buying decisions, personal freedoms) might fit the dictionary definition of sinister.
    • cryptonector 3y ago
      > I think it's immoral that states can advertise their lotteries full-stop. Is it advertising lotteries that is immoral, or the lotteries themselves?
  • 8338550bff96 3y ago
    > I think regardless of the specifics, using <compound noun> to manipulate people into gambling is predatory and immoral... Fixed this for you bro
    • vouaobrasil 3y ago
      Okay, so that means these two sentences are the same: "It is very immoral to stab someone with a knife." "It is very immoral to kill a billion people with a bomb." And we should treat these situations with the same attention. Whatever happened to considering magnitude?
      • Aerroon 3y ago
        Aren't they equivalent in terms of morality? If they aren't, then you've basically answered the Trolley Problem by implying that the outcome with more deaths is morally worse. Magnitude is a question of pragmatism. I don't think pragmatism is very popular among people when looking at things like the war on drugs (despite so many people being against it, nothing has changed).
      • 8338550bff96 3y ago
        Why are you using sentences other than the template that I showed? The outcome for "It is very immoral to stab someone with a knife." and "It is very immoral to kill a billion people with a bomb." is very different in scale and kind. What I highlighted is that the means by which a common objective is reached is irrelevant when the objective is inherently immoral. I hope this helps you understand how language works.
        • vouaobrasil 3y ago
          > What I highlighted is that the means by which a common objective is reached is irrelevant when the objective is inherently immoral. I disagree completely if after the initial objective is reached, the means then propagates the reaching of further objectives that are also immoral. And the more advanced the technology, the more immoral means will be reached.
      • 3y ago
  • silverquiet 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • vouaobrasil 3y ago
      Well, in general, there is a very strong mythology with technophiles in general and here in particular. It is the mythology that we should further technological progress because, well, "because!" Unfortunately, this mythology is becoming exceptionally maladaptive in modern society but we can't see it because it is so deeply ingrained.
      • kevindamm 3y ago
        It is so deeply ingrained because there are many ways in which technology has made life better, both for the technophile and the average person. Admittedly, there are many harms as well. I can't say whether one outweighs the other, and perhaps it is because the technophile often avoids many of the involved harms that it becomes too easy for many to overlook them or play down the impact.
        • vouaobrasil 3y ago
          It is a difficult question indeed, and it depends also on the following: are we measuring the developments of today by how they will affect the world in 10 years or 100? Most people seem to agree that the latter is the more logical measure, yet we operate as if we are using the former.
      • silverquiet 3y ago
        My biggest complaint is the tendency to conflate change with progress. Perhaps I'm something of a luddite, but in the last ten to fifteen years or so, I have seen plenty of change, but whether it has been beneficial is often hard to suss out. It seems rather uncontroversial now that social media is detrimental to teen mental health (and I really don't think it's limited to teens). From the start I saw reasoned arguments that this sort of technology was deleterious for a few reasons, but the counterargument I usually saw here was, "yeah, but look at how much Facebook pays developers... and they contribute to open source". Two of the most prestigious of companies here, the F and the G in FAANG are purely advertising companies (and the others have plenty of it as well); what are they doing but trying to manipulate you into buying things you probably don't need? Obviously the pay is attractive, but is that how anyone but a psychopath wants to spend their career?
  • nerdjon 3y ago
    I really want to know who green lit this after seeing all of the controversy with Google and was like, yeah we won't have a problem like that billion dollar company. There are already a lot of sleazy ads that I see for gambling and the lottery. But this is extremely predatory since it personifies the possible winning. This should be straight up illegal.
    • MPSimmons 3y ago
      >after seeing all of the controversy with Google This reeks of someone doing absolutely no market research
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • hobs 3y ago
    Oh we reflect on it all the time allright, its just that those in power like the status quo, and will put forth enormous effort to keep it.
  • duped 3y ago
    Gambling is predatory and immoral(*), regardless of what technology is used to advertise it. I know that makes me sound like a tea totaler who was trapped in cryogenic sleep for the last century, but I really can't think of a good reason to allow any kind of gambling at scale in our society. It's filled with negatives. (*) of course, this is my opinion, you might not have the same morals as I do.
    • GreenWatermelon 3y ago
      > It's filled with negative I would even say it's only negatives. But unfortunately, it will have to stay legal, otherwise people would still seek it through illegal means, possibly exposing themselves to much worse dangers. It's the same problem with drugs (including Alcohol) and tobacco, they need to be legal in order to he regulated.
      • duped 3y ago
        I disagree, because industrialized gambling is very different from illegal gambling in terms of availability. I see the prevalence of slots in my neighborhood after they legalized gambling wholesale in my state and I don't think it's been made better by "regulation" except through some additional taxes, it's just made it easier to access. The same could be said about prohibition for alcohol and tobacco. Raising the age for legal tobacco consumption did reduce consumption, and prohibition did lower consumption permanently for alcohol.
  • rdtsc 3y ago
    > manipulate people into gambling is predatory and immoral Exactly. Especially at the government level. Fine, some states allow casinos to operate, but it's pretty evil when they run lotteries themselves. The ridiculous reason "we're using these funds this to help educate people about math" is just that, ridiculous.
  • SilasX 3y ago
    I think, regardless of the specifics, using a HN discussion as a pretense to push your tangentially-related pet issue is immoral.
  • throwaway48476 3y ago
    Advertisers truly aren't people.
    • sangnoir 3y ago
      How do you support your livelihood, if it involves products or services, kindly share your sales funnel.
    • aspenmayer 3y ago
      Part of me agrees with you, but another part of me hesitates to dehumanize anyone, as that way lies madness. I'm reminded of the film They Live (1988). The protagonist, Nada, seeks a job at a construction site, as that is his trade. Due to the union, the foreman can only hire Nada as a day laborer, as Nada is not in the union. His way of life is gate-kept by powerful interests controlling the hiring process, and access to capital is constrained by these interests. By the time Nada obtains the sunglasses, he has already lost that job and is well down the path of becoming radicalized. Ironically perhaps, he first heard about the group producing the sunglasses when they hijacked the TV signals to essentially advertise their ideology. Once Nada acquires the glasses, he could be said to be enlightened, but I also view it as a sort of cautionary tale, considering how the film ends for Nada. Along the way, he sees through all of the ads, and in fact much of the surrounding content itself rings hollow for him. His actions are reminiscent of Ted Kaczynski in this context. Why didn’t he instead seek to join the union? Were the glasses actually what they purported to be, or were they a kind of rose-colored glasses that were designed to manipulate the wearer just like the advertisements did, but while making them believe they were seeing things more truly? Nada thought he was acting under his own agency before putting on the glasses, and yet he so readily trusted that he was still after putting them on, while adopting an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian ideology as part of an underground fringe group. Perhaps Nada was just tired of being part of the system, but by rage quitting as he did, we as the viewer are led to believe he goes out in a blaze of glory, but I view his exit to stage left thusly as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” to quote the Bard of Avon. There is no exit from capitalism that way, if there is any alternative at all if capitalist realism holds true, and Nada’s final line is perhaps an admission that he was himself used all along, and he was simply tired of scraping by and being in scrapes. He had gone down the path he was on as long as he was willing to go, and there was no way back, as he was already too far gone to come back. I’m reminded of the is/ought distinction, and I’d make a similar distinction between advertisements/content. Content is itself a similar kind of appeal to believe or think about concepts and ideals and ideas that come from outside ourselves. Due to the power of belief, capital seeks to gate-keep access to content, and advertising acts as a sort of escape hatch, blow-off valve, or side door through which access to those seeking content are able to be reached, accessible for a fee. It’s not exactly ideal, and not without its own hidden costs to the buyer or seller. Lack of capital is the conflict that leads to the crisis in Nada’s life, but I wish that his story had a happy ending. I feel that Nada was perhaps less free after putting on the sunglasses than he was before, as strange as that may sound. He fell for a classic blunder, believing that he actually was immune to advertising, rather than being sold an even bigger lie: that he could (only?) effect change through violence, that his life was no longer worth living.
• croes 3y ago
  AI is a box of chocolates ... How often do AI sites show the example of an astronaut riding a horse on Mars? Changed the horse to a duck and never got a satisfying result. AI doesn't understand, we learn through trial and error how to get the result we want but it seems the way to the result is always different. That's like programming but the keyword change in every function.
  • josefresco 3y ago
    > Changed the horse to a duck and never got a satisfying result I also found this curious. Stable Diffusion is great at creating this one image but then for some mysterious reason sucks at almost every subsequent request using default/recommended settings. Sometimes even a request for another astronaut riding a horse produces garbage.
• rootsudo 3y ago
  “Megan feared that the image could potentially get out and that it would happen to another website visitor. She told a friend, who happens to know someone at Washington’s Lottery, what happened.” Well, it’s out now.
  • itishappy 3y ago
    "Fearing the image could get out, she shared it directly with the local news."
• pierat 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • xkcd-sucks 3y ago
    This inconsistency might have something to do with what the feminists call "consent"
  • bergen 3y ago
    >all depending on the type of news/propaganda utilized No it's depending on the intention of the person wearing those same breasts. This is very clearly non-consentual presentation of an individual in a sexy pose. There's an argument to be had about female nudity, but this is separate from getting visually stripped by a computer without your consent.
  • stetrain 3y ago
    I think the consent of the person whose body parts (or AI-imagined body parts) are being shown makes a bit of a difference.
    • pierat 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • stetrain 3y ago
        Oof.
      • op00to 3y ago
        If I upload my kids picture to a website that reimagines them as an elf, I give consent to that. I clearly do not give consent to creating an image of my kid dressed up in a nazi uniform saluting Hitler. Giving consent to one thing doesn’t imply that every other possible use of the technology is also consented to.
      • Kerb_ 3y ago
        Lotta people do and have been taking issue with gambling and lottery advertisements since before AI got involved. I'd imagine that group is going to continue beating that drum regardless of the technology used to sell gambling and don't feel the need to ask.
• cantSpellSober 3y ago
  > the AI superimposes your image into the vacation spot > She was shocked at one of the AI photos Washington’s Lottery spit out For discussion: is it possible this was this a joke (not on the victim's part) in very poor taste?
  • tomrod 3y ago
    Several of the image generators will create pornographic images due to their training data. This really isn't unexpected if the devs weren't careful with the generation service chosen?
    • MPSimmons 3y ago
      Nothing in this article screams 'careful'
  • NathanKP 3y ago
    Nah, it sounds like a simple latent space adjacency problem. When you give an image generation model the "swimming" keyword, that makes it much more likely to produce bathing suits and bikinis, and once it is already generating that much bare skin it is likely to keep going and make some bare breasts (if many images of bare breasts are trained into the model). Their claimed prompt of "swimming with the sharks" also introduces an element of danger and excitement, which some models could also use as a signal to introduce risqué elements. Basically, if models produced only what you asked for they would produce extraordinarily boring results. Many models come up with additional elements to add to the image based on the adjacent elements encoded in the latent space branching off of your prompt. The main issue here would be their prompt choice ("swimming with the sharks" was a slightly risky prompt. It could have easily gone another way and generated a gory Jaws-inspired image of her getting eaten by a shark). Secondary as an issue is the model that they used (likely a model that has too many NSFW images trained in). The big lesson for corporate entities is to pay attention to the training data that was used in the model (if you want purely SFW results you have to use a model that has nothing NSFW trained in) and also carefully consider what imagery your keywords is likely to produce as a side effect.
• houseofzeus 3y ago
  '“I also think whoever was responsible for it should be fired,” she added.' Ah but that's the joy of, it sorry about that - wasn't us, it was the computer!
  • nkrisc 3y ago
    That’s the true value of AI.
    • vouaobrasil 3y ago
      That is a good point, I hadn't thought much about that. AI is an excellent tool for shifting responsibility to big tech, who in turn can easily weather the storm with their world-class legal teams.
    • _xnmw 3y ago
      Bingo. Also see the "AI" system used by Israel to target "Hamas". "It's not us, it's the AI".
      • rchaud 3y ago
        Should be added to the Five Standard Excuses, from the '80s show Yes Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y4PEqvk0Jg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y4PEqvk0Jg
  • chrisjj 3y ago
    But "it" is the decision to use (so-called) AI.
  • OnionBlender 3y ago
    That's exactly what Air Canada tried to pull. > The airline tried to argue that it shouldn't be liable for anything its chatbot says. https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy/ https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy...
• pinebox 3y ago
  The most disturbing thing about this is that the lottery couldn't seem to confirm if it happened or not.
  • maweki 3y ago
    It's easier from a privacy perspective to not store and retain the submitted and rendered photos. One less thing to worry about regarding the privacy agreement.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • MarcoZavala 3y ago
    [dead]
• f1refly 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • cantSpellSober 3y ago
    The only person calling it "porn" is the author of this article published on a conservative site. It's double-cickbait ("how awful!" and "...but I wanna see porn").
    • f1refly 3y ago
      True, I didn't even notice. What a weird way to present this.
  • sigzero 3y ago
    Except it wasn't art and context matters. Softcore pornography generally contains nudity or partial nudity in sexually suggestive situations, but not explicit sexual activity. She half-nude on a bed. I'd say that fits the definition.
    • genman 3y ago
      Not necessarily. It depends on the expression. Beds are used mainly for resting and many people sleep naked or half naked. Perhaps it is an American thing to see everything as pornography when it involves a naked body but there are many cases when it is not and is art instead (yes - that includes half naked women or men sitting on the bed). Please not that it doesn't follow that her consent is not required in this case.
  • malfist 3y ago
    There's a heck of a difference between someone voluntarily participating in a photo shoot that involves nudity, and a random person taking your face and photoshopping it onto a nude body. Consent is the difference between art and revenge porn.
  • jimbokun 3y ago
    Irrelevant. The point is she didn’t consent to her image being used in this way.
• inanutshellus 3y ago
  FWIW, in trying to explain the various ways machine learning can go awry to our business users, I recently discovered the "AI Incident Database" (https://incidentdatabase.ai/ https://incidentdatabase.ai/). It's full of interesting gaffes AIs make and while it looks like this one hasn't been submitted yet, I assume it'll be there soon. If you're interested at all in tracking these, it's a great resource.
  • mdaniel 3y ago
    In case one were curious how the sausage gets made, grab some popcorn and marvel at this python: https://github.com/responsible-ai-collaborative/nlp-monitoring/blob/main/fetch_news.py https://github.com/responsible-ai-collaborative/nlp-monitori... and the RSS feeds they monitor https://github.com/responsible-ai-collaborative/nlp-monitoring/blob/main/data_feeds.json https://github.com/responsible-ai-collaborative/nlp-monitori...
• havetocharge 3y ago
  I wonder if there's a way to find out which AI model is used on the backend.
  • donatj 3y ago
    So you can avoid it?
  • jaimex2 3y ago
    Not Gemeni as she would have come out black. Probably a poorly configured Stable Diffusion 1.4 variant.
• HumblyTossed 3y ago
  > “I also think whoever was responsible for it should be fired,” she added. It will probably be an engineer and not the idiot who thought this would be a great idea.
  • mingus88 3y ago
    This is a state gov. The blame is shifted 100% to the contractors and consultants who developed the site Number 1, that’s because state governments aren’t paying salaries for full time AI developers. WA has a huge software industry that pays competitive salaries. Number 2, state positions are the last bastions of pensions in our workforce and nobody is risking their nest egg for a decision that they can pawn off on a temporary contract worker. I started my career at a place like this. All decisions are made by a committee and the actual work is outsourced. Nobody is going down for this.
• ct0 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • gostsamo 3y ago
    When the context is sexually suggestive and someone is using your face for it, it is. I agree that the US seems to be too nipple sensitive, but human communication and interpretation happens in context and the context is not good in this case.
  • dhosek 3y ago
    National Geographic was the premier source of photographs of bare breasts for earlier generations. I remember a joke about it on Happy Days (1970s show referencing the 1950s, reflecting a common thread through both decades) and certainly, the photographs were popular viewing among the adolescent males of my youth.
  • toddmorey 3y ago
    Well… the generated image has this seductive vibe to it as if she’s trying to start an onlyfans account. This isn’t a National Geographic image. Even set that aside and it’s still an example of an outcome that an AI was specifically prompted not to produce. Paired with the article about Israel’s use of AI to make wartime targeting decisions and it feels super problematic.
    • chrisjj 3y ago
      > it’s still an example of an outcome that an AI was specifically prompted not to produce. There is no evidence of such prompting.
      • toddmorey 3y ago
        They said in the article they’d prompted it to avoid nudity. I tend to believe that because it makes sense for a promotional website connected to a state agency.
        • 3y ago
• jfengel 3y ago
  They're basically calling BS: "As soon as we did, we had the developers check all the parameters for the platform and were comfortable with the settings, but after further internal discussions today, we chose to take down the site out of an abundance of caution, as we don’t want something like this purported event to happen again." It's weasel worded, which makes it sound like they're not 100% certain. It should be easy enough to check the logs, but I imagine there's somebody out there right now going "Why the hell didn't I log every picture we generate?"
  • justinclift 3y ago
    Alternatively, they're just trying to sow doubt in order to later claim it never happened.
  • mingus88 3y ago
    Logging every image generated, using personally identifying photos, adds a big risk with almost zero upside. The reason not to store the images is right here in front of us. “Oops we may have generated topless photos of women who submitted their photos, but I can unequivocally state that nobody aside from that person saw the image, if it even existed”
    • malfist 3y ago
      Another point to not storing it: Storing all the images your users generate could require a non-trivial amount of disk space. And considering this is government, they're probably using a server farm and bare metal, and not an infinitely scalable file storage
      • flemhans 3y ago
        Bare metal is cheaper so would help them to be able to store this amount of files. 10,000,000 photos are trivial to store on a 4-drive zfs array
      • ndriscoll 3y ago
        If you stored a 50kB avif (which would be way higher quality then you need for this), you could do 20 million images / TB. Bare metal can fit almost 2 PB of raw storage in 1U now. "Infinitely scalable" is not really a thing anyone needs to worry about.
• fullshark 3y ago
  All this GenAI to basically get people to spend more time on their phones, either looking at ads or gambling. At the same time devaluing genuine artistic achievements for low effort simulations of such. What a depressing technology we are all working on.
• lubesGordi 3y ago
  Ah, non-determinism at its finest.
• Kerb_ 3y ago
  "’Our tax dollars are paying for that!’... Megan explained" Yep, about $.01 to generate that image distributed between 7 million tax payers in that state. I love that people are so focused on saving pennies that they don't comprehend the long term issues we are gonna face :) While I do understand how frustrating it is, about any other argument sounds like it would be better than the monetary one.
  • KMnO4 3y ago
    I also noticed that. I almost laughed at the absurdity. “How do you feel that softcore porn of you was created and hosted on this website?” “The part that annoys me is that the the government had the audacity to do this with MY money”
  • phillipcarter 3y ago
    The phrase is more common in conservative circles than liberal ones. Since the site is explicitly a conservative media outlet, it's not surprising that they used this quote.
    • aaron695 3y ago
      [dead]
  • esotericimpl 3y ago
    [dead]
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    And Washington would probably say her tax dollars not paying for it, the lottery is. Though in both cases it's state money.
  • nilamo 3y ago
    I don't think most people understand how millage rates work. Complaining about how expensive some projects are, but then it's less than $5/year if you actually calculate the millage.
• ilaksh 3y ago
  I find it quite funny, especially if you realize that something like 90% of the Stable Diffusion model fine-tunes out there are actually made for generating porn or images of females. Go to the website that has the most image generation models to verify this for yourself: https://civitai.com https://civitai.com WARNING don't visit this site on your work computer. But point being, it is actually kind of hard to find a Stable Diffusion model variant that is fine-tuned to avoid fairly broken generation that comes from the base models but doesn't have female objectification built into its fine-tuning dataset. Especially if you go searching for "Stable Diffusion models" and happen upon that site, since it does have the most models.
  • Der_Einzige 3y ago
    What's even funnier is if you work professionally with diffusion models, you have to go to civitai.com as a work requirement! I've had the talk with at least 5 significantly older coworkers who didn't know what "booru" websites are or why it is that civitai is so full of anime. Imagine trying to explain what the hell "Pony Diffusion" is and why everyone is using it suddenly.
  • Tenoke 3y ago
    To be fair that's partially the case because the base models are worse at NSFW while decent at other stuff. If you look at actual images generated then NSFW is common but hardly the majority of images.
  • araes 3y ago
    Don't know what part of the shadowban Matrix you're looking at, yet I did not see a single nipple in 10 pages of image and model scrolling with Woman selected as the highlight choice. Vaguely a let down after that much NSFW warnings. (Obviously, many that are meant to create "porn" images. Although even those looked mostly like upskirt anime generators). Notably, a LOT of beefcake and partially shirtless male imagery on normal search. Also, quite a bit of "psst, this is really furry imagery"
    • Fubarberry 3y ago
      The website has started filtering anything tagged nsfw, you'll have to create an account and enable 13+ or 18+ imagery.
• ta1243 3y ago
  Oh no, bare breasts, how awful!
  • jimbokun 3y ago
    Without consent of the person whose face was attached to those breasts.
  • yareal 3y ago
    Bodies are bodies, nudity is no big deal. But someone should have the ability to decide how their body is depicted. Someone should be able to say, "I'm not comfortable baring my breasts." And we should be ok with that. Consent matters.
    • ta1243 3y ago
      The person consented to put their face on a scene of some sort. Given the majority of people on a beach are topless selecting what would life be like if I could take a holiday" doesn't sound shocking that it shows you.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • nozzlegear 3y ago
        I’d love to see your numbers for the “majority of people on a beach” being topless, because outside of places in Europe I don’t think it’s going to shake out quite as overwhelmingly as you seem to think. And since we’re talking about someone from Washington state in the first place, it’s certainly not the norm there.
        • yareal 3y ago
          Toplessness, interestingly, is not illegal in Washington. And if the parent poster is including male toplessness, it's possible that some breaches are at times majority topless. The rest of their argument is rubbish, of course, but it's kinda funny that they right in that "broken clock" sort of way a little bit.
• tinix 3y ago
  topless isn't porn, breasts can be exposed in public here. the ai just knows https://www.kuow.org/stories/it-s-totally-legal-to-be-naked-in-public-in-seattle https://www.kuow.org/stories/it-s-totally-legal-to-be-naked-...
  • peddling-brink 3y ago
    But topless can be porn. And this was. And this was non-consensual.
    • SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      If we’re arguing pointless things… it also wasn’t real. How about the meaningful thing, that why is tax payer money being used to create a generative AI site at all? This should be a non-problem because this is in no way the role of government.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • roywiggins 3y ago
    Sure, but handing out crudely photoshopped nude photos of strangers out to them is not going to go over well, especially if you're wearing a uniform that says "Washington State Government Employee" on it
• crtasm 3y ago
  >Prior to launch, we agreed to a comprehensive set of rules to govern image creation, including that people in images be fully clothed. And here is your reminder that "AI" is unable to agree to your rules.
• caseysoftware 3y ago
  The psychological effects of "Imagine how your life could be.." are manipulative and disgusting. It's playing to baser instincts and if they were run by anyone other than the State, they'd probably be illegal. Oh wait, they are.
  • jmorenoamor 3y ago
    It's marketing. Nearly all the advertisement industry tries to make you feel insecure about something, and then give you a warm helping hand. It's probably the most hideous legal business that exists.
• jameshart 3y ago
  Every time an AI model is released, people on this site show up to complain about how it has been censored and bent to some puritan agenda. ‘Why,’ they ask, ‘would I want a politically correct AI that’s been nerfed so it can’t offend anyone?’ Well, this is what happens if you build real applications using insufficiently censored AI. This is why OpenAI and Google and stability always explain how they have restricted training content and aligned the output to avoid producing controversial output. Because they want people to build applications using this technology and those people do not want this headline to appear about them.
  • hedora 3y ago
    Regardless of their intentions, current state of the art automatic censorship have dangerously bad false positive and false negative rates. So, they inadvertently and inevitably suppress the truth and broadcast misinformation. Their performance on images is similarly bad. Of course, even if they did work, centralizing control of them is a bad idea. The end user should have the freedom to control such things. (In the same way you can type swear words into a word processor).
    • the_snooze 3y ago
      In practice, these AI models are centralized services. Few people are running them locally on their machine with knowledge of the training data, weights, or system prompts. There isn't a direct line between "user intent" and "system output," unlike the local word processor in your example. Someone has to make value judgments on the underlying data and algorithms, if only to build the system in the first place. If users can't (or don't care to) run these models locally, who else will decide other than the service operator?
    • jameshart 3y ago
      ‘The censorship work done in AI alignment is insufficiently accurate to rely on for production use’ is a good and valid position ‘Therefore AI vendors should release uncensored models and let everyone else figure it out’ is not a logical consequent from it. ‘Therefore don’t use current AI tech to build apps that photomanipulate user submitted content and echo the results back to them with your logo on it’ would be a more logical conclusion to draw.
• thedookmaster 3y ago
  > We were made aware that a single user of the AI platform was purportedly provided an image that did not adhere to the built-in parameters set by the developers. I laughed at this. What a non-apology with no accountability.
  • panda-giddiness 3y ago
    That's the quote that stuck out to me, too. It's like they're insinuating that the person is lying (while elsewhere admitting they don't have evidence either way). I mean, I don't want to backseat-quarterback here, but would it have been so hard to say something like, "We have decided to take our website offline while we investigate a report that our website generated an inappropriate image of a user"?
• kaptainscarlet 3y ago
  AI might erode some of the gains we got from camera techonology because the better it gets at manipulating images, the less humans trust digital images as evidence
  • rchaud 3y ago
    Humans already don't trust digital images. See the rise of catfishing in online dating, or deepfake ads of Musk and Bill Gates shilling some shitcoin.
• yurisalazar 3y ago
  lol, sorry guys, forgot to put NSFW on negative prompt field
• skywhopper 3y ago
  The saddest part of this is that the everyone involved from the reporter, to the lottery staff, to the company that provided the service, all appear to think that the prompts they provided to the AI are somehow bulletproof and that their human understanding of the parameters matches what the software will do: “we had the developers check all the parameters for the platform and were comfortable with the settings, but after further internal discussions today, we chose to take down the site out of an abundance of caution.” I know eventually the reality of these tools’ flaws will seep in but it’s always somewhat surprising to me how certain most people (including tech folks in the field who ought to know better) are that the AI actually “understands” the prompt in the way that a human would.
  • Apocryphon 3y ago
    AI is marketed as magic, and laypeople will believe them to be so. Blame the hollow promises of the makers and the sellers.
  • burntalmonds 3y ago
    The statement they made was confusing. Abudance of caution? It already generated AI porn.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    Turn on the news, or check social media. Every AI example shown is of something remarkable. That is very much the vision that AI companies are selling.
• isaacfrond 3y ago
  This site has a couple of example pictures that show how the system was supposed to work: https://adage.com/article/marketing-news-strategy/washingtons-lottery-ads-use-ai-show-winners-plans/2545131 https://adage.com/article/marketing-news-strategy/washington... The pictures look kinda nice actually! Pity it turned in the another AI fiasco. Reminds me of the Microsoft chatbox Tay. Another one of such well intentions but ultimately doomed AI projects.
• rchaud 3y ago
  I never thought I'd long for the days of bog-standard Corporate Memphis clipart to decorate web pages.
• d-z-m 3y ago
  > “I also think whoever was responsible for it should be fired,” she added. I understand she's upset, and rightfully so. However, I find the vindictiveness distasteful.
  • friend_and_foe 3y ago
    I think the vindictiveness is all this is about. She's looking to win a lawsuit. I don't agree with your "rightfully so" perspective. A woman in the privacy of her own home put a picture of her face into a prompt and it spit out a picture of someone that maybe looks a lot like her, topless. Big deal. She either has to be feigning outrage or she's never seen herself naked in the mirror.
    • nozzlegear 3y ago
      Personally I’m of the opinion that the government shouldn’t be generating nude images of anyone. It doesn’t take real outrage or faux-outrage for me to hold that opinion either.
• ofslidingfeet 3y ago
  I don't really buy that they accidentally used a model capable of generating nude breasts. This is either bored glowies trying to decide for everyone whether AI is acceptable or the woman is lying.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • CyberDildonics 3y ago
    glowies You think secret government agent operatives put the AI topless woman on the state lottery home page?
    • ofslidingfeet 3y ago
      You make them sound important or rare or something.
      • CyberDildonics 3y ago
        Are the secret government agent operatives in the room with us right now?
  • nozzlegear 3y ago
    Is it really that hard to believe that these idiot machines screw up? Furthermore, I find your implication that “bored glowies” would decide to bring down all of AI by posting a topless photo via the Washington state lottery apparatus, of all things, to be preposterous. Surely the Deep State could come up with something more effective.
• 015a 3y ago
  > “I also think whoever was responsible for it should be fired,” she added. > “We were made aware that a single user of the AI platform was purportedly provided an image that did not adhere to the built-in parameters set by the developers. Prior to launch, we agreed to a comprehensive set of rules to govern image creation, including that people in images be fully clothed. We have not seen the image that the AI provided to this user, but out of an abundance of caution we took the website down,” the spokesperson confirmed to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. Here's a tangential take to all this, but its the overwhelming thing I feel reading this: Something happened to our society which resulted in effectively no one being able to be held accountable for anything. Its always "well, we wrote this policy and we were well within the policy! the thing just went oopsie daisy no one could have predicted that!" They were creating and distributing porn of non-consenting individuals. Everyone involved with this should be fired, and maybe actually it should go further than that. I feel this tremendously in the day-to-day of the tech world. I will make some system change which brings down production. I hop on a postmortem with my boss, and the first thing she says: "We have a blameless engineering culture. Its not your fault, and I don't hold you responsible." I disagree, entirely: it is my fault. I need to own it, and I don't understand how people function tip-toeing around accepting responsibility for something that is obviously their fault. How do you, the individual, improve?
  • Aerroon 3y ago
    Did they actually distribute the image to anyone else other than the woman? The developers say they hadn't seen the image nor was the journalist able to find it.
    • 015a 3y ago
      Sure, the developers said they hadn't seen the image and that they'd never seen the image generator do this and etc etc. That's regardless of the truth; there's no reality where they'd say anything else, and their word cannot be trusted. That's the point of an investigation. They have every incentive to make this disappear as quickly as possible. And, to be fair, its doubtful it would get very far; there's no evidence the aggrieved party wants to sue, she doesn't have the photo it generated, etc. I'm not standing on a soapbox arguing that the secret service should get involved or something. I'm just asserting that, it seems to me, we the people should care a bit more about this than we seem to be. Other people saying "its just a bug!" are incomprehensible to me; there's a spectrum between "your signin button is using the wrong hex code" and "your chemotherapy dispenser is outputting the wrong volume of medicine", and it is not obvious to me that this bug isn't closer to the right side of that spectrum than left. An engineer in the room might even know that these generative systems are capable of hallucinogenic, and sometimes even explicit, output; but they don't have the political capital to stop decision makers from deploying these systems, or underinvesting in safeguards, etc. That's why we need pushback, ideally lawsuits but at least public outcry; so decision makers treat the decision to use generative AI with the care and consideration it deserves.
• recursive4 3y ago
  Any word which model they used?
• throwaway5752 3y ago
  It has nothing to do with this story or its credibility, but I was surprised that https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/mynorthwest/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/mynorthwest/ indicating this site is owned by the LDS Church. The website and radio stations are owned by Bonneville International, a publishing company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is a subsidiary of Deseret Management Corporation, a holding company owned by the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
• DamnInteresting 3y ago
  When it comes to AI image generators and questionable content, I've wondered if AI companies can address the problem by using a pair of AIs. Use one AI to generate the image, then feed that image to another AI with a list of questions, such as "Does this image show nudity?", and "Does this image depict violence?" Just a list of everything the AI provider wants to omit from its output. If the answer to any is Yes, discard the image and try again (or just refuse to furnish any image).
• friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Feigned outrage is all I see. A topless photo is not "softcore porn." What an absurd take.