A Telegram user who advertises their services on Twitter will create an AI-generated pornographic image of anyone in the world for as little as $10 if users send them pictures of that person. Like many other Telegram communities and users producing nonconsensual AI-generated sexual images, this user creates fake nude images of celebrities, including images of minors in swimsuits, but is particularly notable because it plainly and openly shows one of the most severe harms of generative AI tools: easily creating nonconsensual pornography of ordinary people.
This is only going to get easier. The djinn is out of the bottle.
“Djinn”, specifically, being the correct word choice. We’re way past fun-loving blue cartoon Robin Williams genies granting wishes, doing impressions of Jack Nicholson and getting into madcap hijinks. We’re back into fuckin’… shapeshifting cobras woven of fire and dust by the archdevil Iblis, hiding in caves and slithering out into the desert at night to tempt mortal men to sin. That mythologically-accurate shit.
Have you ever seen the wishmaster movies?
Make. Your. Wishes.
Doesn’t mean distribution should be legal.
People are going to do what they’re going to do, and the existence of this isn’t an argument to put spyware on everyone’s computer to catch it or whatever crazy extreme you can take it to.
But distributing nudes of someone without their consent, real or fake, should be treated as the clear sexual harassment it is, and result in meaningful criminal prosecution.
Almost always it makes more sense to ban the action, not the tool. Especially for tools with such generalized use cases.
I’m not familiar with the US laws, but… isn’t it already some form of crime or something to distribute nude of someone without their consent? This should not change whether AI is involved or not.
It might depend on whether fabricating them wholesale would be considered a nude or not. Legally, it could be considered a different person if you’re making it, since the “nude” is someone else, and you’re putting their face on top, or it’s a complete fabrication made by a computer.
Unclear if it would still count if it was someone else and they were lying about it being the victim, for example, pretending a headless mirror-nude was sent by the victim, when it was sent by someone else.
As soon as anyone can do this on their own machine with no third parties involved all laws and other measures being discussed will be moot.
We can punish nonconsensual sharing but that’s about it.
As soon as anyone can do this on their own machine with no third parties involved
We’ve been there for a while now
Some people can, I wouldn’t even know where to start. And is the photo/video generator completely on home machines without any processing being done remotely already?
I’m thinking about a future where simple tools are available where anyone could just drop in a photo or two and get anything up to a VR porn video.
And is the photo/video generator completely on home machines without any processing being done remotely already?
Yes
Well…shit. It seems like any new laws are already too little too late then.
Stable Diffusion has been easily locally installed and runnable on any decent GPU for 2 years at this point.
Combine that with Civitai.com for easy to download and run models of almost anything you can imagine - IP, celebrity, concepts, etc… and the possibilities have been endless.
In fact, with completely free apps like Draw Things on iOS, which allows you to run it on YOUR PHONE locally - where you can download models, tweak, customize, hand it images directly from your mobile device’s library… making this stuff is now trivial on the go.
Tensor processors/AI accelerators have also been a thing on new hardware for a while. Mobile devices have them, Intel/Apple include them with their processors, and it’s not uncommon to find them on newer graphics cards.
That would just make it easier compared to needing quite a powerful computer for that kind of task.
I can paint as many nude images of Rihanna as I want.
You may be sued for damages if you sell those nude paintings of Rihanna at a large enough scale that Rihanna notices
This is not new. People have been Photoshopping this kind of thing since before there was Photoshop. Why “AI” being involved matters is beyond me. The result is the same: fake porn/nudes.
And all the hand wringing in the world about it being non consensual will not stop it. The cat has been out of the bag for a long time.
I think we all need to shift to not believing what we see. It is counterintuitive, but also the new normal.
People have been Photoshopping this kind of thing since before there was Photoshop. Why “AI” being involved matters is beyond me
Because now it’s faster, can be generated in bulk and requires no skill from the person doing it.
I blame electricity. Before computers, people had to learn to paint to do this. We should go back to living like medieval peasants.
This, but unironically.
As much skill as a 9 year old and a 16 year old can muster?
no skill from the person doing it.
This feels entirely non-sequitur, to the point of damaging any point you’re trying to make. Whether I paint a nude or the modern Leonardi DaVinci paints a nude our rights (and/or the rights of the model, depending on your perspective on this issue) should be no different, despite the enormous chasm that exists between our artistic skill.
A kid at my high school in the early 90s would use a photocopier and would literally cut and paste yearbook headshots onto porn photos. This could also be done in bulk and doesn’t require any skills that a 1st grader doesn’t have.
Those are easily disproven. There’s no way you think that’s the same thing. If you can pull up the source photo and it’s a clear match/copy for the fake it’s easy to disprove. AI can alter the angle, position, and expression on your face in a believable manor making it a lot harder to link the photo to source material
This was before Google was a thing, much less reverse lookup with Google Images. The point I was making is that this kind of thing happened even before Photoshop. Photoshop made it look even more realistic. AI is the next step. And even the current AI abilities are nothing compared to what they are going to be even 6 months from now. Yes, this is a problem, but it has been a problem for a long time and anyone who has wanted to create fake nudes of someone has had the ability to easily do so for at least a generation now. We might be at the point now where if you want to make sure you don’t have fake nudes created of you, then you don’t have images of yourself published. However now that everyone has high quality cameras in their pockets, this won’t 100% protect you.
But now they are photo realistic
And it’s looked as realistic as AI jobs?
Not relevant. Using someone’s picture never ever required consent.
I hate this: “Just accept it women of the world, accept the abuse because it’s the new normal” techbro logic so much. It’s absolutely hateful towards women.
We have legal and justice systems to deal with this. It is not the new normal for me to be able to make porn of your sister, or mother, or daughter. Absolutely fucking abhorrent.
I don’t know why you’re being down voted. Sure, it’s unfortunately been happening for a while, but we’re just supposed to keep quiet about it and let it go?
I’m sorry, putting my face on a naked body that’s not mine is one thing, but I really do fear for the people whose likeness gets used in some degrading/depraved porn and it’s actually believable because it’s AI generated. That is SO much worse/psychologically damaging if they find out about it.
It’s unacceptable.
We have legal and justice systems to deal with this.
For reference, here’s how we’re doing with child porn. Platforms with problems include (copying from my comment two months ago):
Ill adults and poor kids generate and sell CSAM. Common to advertise on IG, sell on TG. Huge problem as that Stanford report shows.
Telegram got right on it (not). Fuckers.
How do you propose to deal with someone doing this on their computer, not posting them online, for their “enjoyment”? Mass global surveillance of all existing devices?
It’s not a matter of willingly accepting it; it’s a matter of looking at what can be done and what can not. Publishing fake porn, defaming people, and other similar actions are already (I hope… I am not a lawyer) illegal. Asking for the technology that exists, is available, will continue to grow, and can be used in a private setting with no witness to somehow “stop” because of a law is at best wishful thinking.
There’s nothing to be done, nor should be done, for anything someone individually creates, for their own individual use, never to see the light of day. Anything else is about one step removed from thought policing - afterall what’s the difference between a personally created, private image and the thoughts on your brain?
The other side of that is, we have to have protection for people who this has or will be used against. Strict laws regarding posting or sharing material. Easy and fast removal of abusive material. Actual enforcement. I know we have these things in place already, but they need to be stronger and more robust. The one absolute truth with generative AI, versus Photoshop etc is that it’s significantly faster and easier, thus there will likely be an uptick in this kind of material, thus the need for re-examining current laws.
It’s not normal but neither is new: you already could cut and glue your cousin’s photo on a Playboy girl, or Photoshop the hot neighbour on Stallone’s muscle body. Today is just easier.
I don’t care if it’s not new, no one cares about how new it is.
typical morning for me.
I suck at Photoshop and Ive tried many times to get good at it over the years. I was able to train a local stable diffusion model on my and my family’s faces and create numerous images of us in all kinds of situations in 2 nights of work. You can get a snap of someone and have nudes of them tomorrow for super cheap.
I agree there is nothing to be done, but it’s painfully obvious to me that the scale and ease of it that makes it much more concerning.
Also the potential for automation/mass-production. Photoshop work still requires a person to sit down to do the actual photoshop. You can try to script things out, but it’s hardly an easy affair.
By comparison, generative models are much more hands-free. Once you get the basics set up, you can just have it go, and churn things at rates well surpassing what a single human could reasonably do (if you have the computing power for it).
The same reason AR15 rifles are different than muskets
This kind of attitude toward non-consensual actions is what perpetuates them. Fuck that shit.
Scale.
Exactly this. And rather believe cryptographically sighed images by comparing hashes with the one supplied by the owner. Then it’s rather a question of trusting a specific source for a specific kind of content. A news photo of the war in Ukraine by the BBC? Check hash on their site. Their reputation is fini if a false image has been found.
At the same time, that does introduce an additional layer of work. Most people aren’t going to do that just for the extra work that it would involve, in much the same way that people today won’t track down an image back down to the original source, but usually just go by the one that they saw.
Especially for people who aren’t so cryptographically or technologically inclined that they know what a hash is, where to find one, and how to compare it (without just opening them both and checking personally).
Sure but that’s no problem if software would do that automatically for users of big (news) sites. Browsers on desktop and apps on phones.
But I saw it on tee-vee!
The irony of parroting this mindless and empty talking point is probably lost on you.
God, do I really have to start putting the /jk or /s back, for those who don’t get it like you??
Upgraded to “definitely.”
Okay, okay, you won. Happy now? Now go.
