Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or unwilling to enforce their policies about who can buy ads on their platforms.
While parent company Meta’s Ad Library, which archives ads on its platforms, who paid for them, and where and when they were posted, shows that the company has taken down several of these ads previously, many ads that explicitly invited users to create nudes and some ad buyers were up until I reached out to Meta for comment. Some of these ads were for the best known nonconsensual “undress” or “nudify” services on the internet.
It remains fascinating to me how these apps are being responded to in society. I'd assume part of the point of seeing someone naked is to know what their bits look like, while these just extrapolate with averages (and likely, averages of glamor models). So we still dont know what these people actually look like naked.
And yet, people are still scorned and offended as if they were.
Technology is breaking our society, albeit in place where our culture was vulnerable to being broken.
Something like this could be career ending for me. Because of the way people react. “Oh did you see Mrs. Bee on the internet?” Would have to change my name and move three towns over or something. That’s not even considering the emotional damage of having people download you. Knowledge that “you” are dehumanized in this way. It almost takes the concept of consent and throws it completely out the window. We all know people have lewd thoughts from time to time, but I think having a metric on that…it would be so twisted for the self-image of the victim. A marketplace for intrusive thoughts where anyone can be commodified. Not even celebrities, just average individuals trying to mind their own business.
Exactly. I’m not even shy, my boobs have been out plenty and I’ve sent nudes all that. Hell I met my wife with my tits out. But there’s a wild difference between pictures I made and released of my own will in certain contexts and situations vs pictures attempting to approximate my naked body generated without my knowledge or permission because someone had a whim.
I think you might be overreacting, and if you're not, then it says much more about the society we are currently living in than this particular problem.
I'm not promoting AI fakes, just to be clear. That said, AI is just making fakes easier. If you were a teacher (for example) and you're so concerned that a student of yours could create this image that would cause you to pick up and move your life, I'm sad to say they can already do this and they've been able to for the last 10 years.
I'm not saying it's good that a fake, or an unsubstantiated rumor of an affair, etc can have such big impacts on our life, but it is troubling that someone like yourself can fear for their livelihood over something so easy for anyone to produce. Are we so fragile? Should we not worry more about why our society is so prudish and ostracizing to basic human sexuality?
None of that is relevant. The issue being discussed here isn't one of whether or not it's currently possible to create fake nudes.
The original post being replied to indicated that, since AI, an artist, a photoshopper, whatever, is just creating an imaginary set of genitalia, and they have no ability to know if it's accurate or not, there is no damage being done. That's what people are arguing about.
The society we are living in can be handling things incorrectly but it can absolutely have real-world damaging effects. As a collective we should worry about our society, but individuals absolutely are and should be justified in worrying about their lives being damaged by this.
I think this is why it's going to be interesting to see how we navigate this as a society. So far, we've done horribly. It's been over a century now that we've acknowledged sexual harassment in the workplace is a problem that harms workers (and reduces productivity) and yet it remains an issue today (only now we know the human resources department will protect the corporate image and upper management by trying to silence the victims).
What deepfakes and generative AI does is make it easy for a campaign staffer, or an ambitious corporate later climber with a buddy with knowhow, or even a determined grade-school student to create convincing media and publish it on the internet. As I note in the other response, if a teen's sexts get reported to law enforcement, they'll gladly turn it into a CSA production and distribution issue and charge the teens themselves with serious felonies with long prison sentences. Now imagine if some kid wanted to make a rival disappear. Heck, imagine the smart kid wanting to exact revenge on a social media bully, now equipped with the power of generative AI.
The thing is, the tech is out of the bag, and as with princes in the mid-east looking at cloned sheep (with deteriorating genetic defects) looking to create a clone of himself as an heir, humankind will use tech in the worst, most heinous possible ways until we find cause to cease doing so. (And no, judicial punishment doesn't stop anyone). So this is going to change society, whether we decide collectively that sexuality (even kinky sexuality) is not grounds to shame and scorn someone, or that we use media scandals the way Italian monastics and Russian oligarchs use poisons, and scandalize each other like it's the shootout at O.K. Corral.
Thanks, I liked this reply. There is a lot of nuance here.
Wtf are you even talking about? People should have the right to control if they are "approximated" as nude. You can wax poetic how it's not nessecarily correct but that's because you are ignoring the woman who did not consent to the process. Like, if I posted a nude then that's on the internet forever. But now, any picture at all can be made nude and posted to the internet forever. You're entirely removing consent from the equation you ass.
I'm not arguing whether people should or should not have control over whether others can produce a nude (or lewd) likeness or perpetuate false scandal, only that this technology doesn't change the equation. People have been accused of debauchery and scorned long before the invention of the camera, let alone digital editing.
Julia the Elder was portrayed (poorly, mind you) in sexual congress on Roman graffiti. Marie Antoinette was accused of a number of debauched sexual acts she didn't fully comprehend. Marie Antoinette actually had an uninteresting sex life. It was accusations of The German Vice (id est lesbianism) that were the most believable and quickened her path to the guillotine.
The movie, The Contender (2000) addresses the issue with happenstance evidence. A woman politician was caught on video inflagrante delicto at a frat party in her college years just as she was about to be appointed as a replacement Vice President.
Law enforcement still regards sexts between underage teens as child porn, and our legal system will gladly incarcerate those teens for the crime of expressing their intimacy to their lovers. (Maine, I believe, is the sole exception, having finally passed laws to let teens use picture messaging to court each other.) So when it comes to the intersection of human sexuality and technology, so far we suck at navigating it.
To be fair, when it comes to human sexuality at all, US society sucks at navigating it. We still don't discuss consent in grade school. I can't speak for anywhere else in the world, though I've not heard much good news.
The conversation about revenge porn (which has been made illegal without the consent of all participants in the US) appears to inform how society regards explicit content of private citizens. I can't speak to paparazzi content. Law hasn't quite caught up with Photoshop, let alone deepfakes and content made with generative AI systems.
But my point was, public life, whether in media, political, athletic or otherwise, is competitive and involves rivalries that get dirty. Again, if we, as a species actually had the capacity for reason, we would be able to choose our cause célèbre with rationality, and not judge someone because some teenager prompted a genAI platform to create a convincing scandalous video.
I think we should be above that, as a society, but we aren't. My point was that I don't fully understand the mechanism by which our society holds contempt for others due to circumstances outside their control, a social behavior I find more abhorrent than using tech to create a fictional image of someone in the buff for private use.
Sadly, fictitious explicit media can be as effective as a character assassination tool as the real thing. I think it should be otherwise. I think we should be better than that, but we're not. I am, consequently frustrated and disappointed with my society and my species. And while I think we're going to need to be more mature about it, I've opined this since high school in the 1980s and things have only gotten worse.
At the same time, it's like the FGC-9, the tech cannot be contained any than we can stop software piracy with DRM. Nor can we trust the community at large to use it responsibly. So yes, you can expect explicit media of colleagues to fly much the way accusations of child sexual assault flew in the 1990s (often without evidence in middle and upper management. It didn't matter.) And we may navigate it pretty much the same way, with the same high rate of career casualties.
An artist doesn't need your consent to paint/ draw you. A photographer doesn't need your consent if your in public. You likely posted your original picture in public (yay facebook). Unfortunately consent was never a concern here... and you likely gave it anyway.
Are you seriously saying that since I am walking in public I am giving concent to photos taken of me and turned nude?
You've lost your damn mind.
Nope. Quite the opposite in that consent is not required.
Edit: You have no right to restrict someone else from taking photos and videos while in public. Period. Their purpose and use doesn't matter (commercial usage can be limited to some extents). https://lifehacker.com/know-your-rights-photography-in-public-5912250
There are limits regarding the right to take pictures in public. Instances of creepshot photographers have raised issues of good faith. For-purpose media (a street scene in the news, for instance, requires that any foreground person must have consent, or must be censored out.
So, dependjng on your state and county (or nation) it may be a crime to take pictures of someone else with an intent to use them as a foreground element without their consent (explicit or otherwise).
This is why I said this...
But let's look at it this way...
https://www.earthcam.com/world/ireland/dublin/?cam=templebar
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/florida/lauderdalebythesea/town/?cam=lbts_beach
https://www.earthcam.com/usa/florida/naples/?cam=naplespier
https://www.earthcam.com/world/southkorea/seoul/songridangil/?cam=songridan_gil
https://www.earthcam.com/world/israel/jerusalem/?cam=jerusalem
So why is nothing on this site blurred? If there are "limits" why is there literally cameras being streamed of public places that can have faces in the foreground pretty clearly without consent. EVEN CHILDREN! WHO WILL THINK OF THE CHILDREN! (/s) Earthcam makes money doing this...
How about literally every company with a security camera?
This is never litigated under the issue of pictures in public. This is always done under stalking/harassment laws. None of them are ever just "He took a picture that I'm in".
How about if I buy stock photos and feed that into the AI system. Does that count since they didn't intend for that to be it's use? "Creepy" and "morally wrong" isn't necessarily illegal. The concern isn't the public photography and actually ownership of the photo belongs to the person who takes the photos not the subjects in the photo. So yes, you don't particularly have much recourse unless you can prove damages that falls under some other law. Case and point Paparazzi... I mean there's literally been lawsuits where the settlement was in favor of the photographer AGAINST the subject https://sports-entertainment.brooklaw.edu/media/a-new-type-of-internet-troll-how-paparazzi-use-copyright-law-to-cash-out-on-celebritys-instagram-posts/ She used a photo on her insta from that paparazzi, the paparazzi sued, settlement was reached and the photo was removed. She didn't have license to use that photo, even though it's her in the picture. You can find this shit literally everywhere. We've already litigated this to death. Now we all think that paparazzi are generally scum... but that doesn't make it illegal.
What is new here is does an AI generated thing count as something special on it's own in a legal perspective. The act of obtaining pictures while in public is not really a debate even if they were obtained to create a derivative work. I fall on the side of the AI generated thing being fair use. It's a transformation of the original work and doesn't violate your actual privacy (certainly not any more than taking pictures of a nude beach). IMO any other stance would negate so much other shit that we all rely on (meme-culture specifically) that it's hypocritical to hold any other stance. Do I like that... Not really, but it doesn't make sense otherwise.
I suspect it's more affecting for younger people who don't really think about the fact that in reality, no one has seen them naked. Probably traumatizing for them and logic doesn't really apply in this situation.
Does it really matter though? "Well you see, they didn't actually see you naked, it was just a photorealistic approximation of what you would look like naked".
At that point I feel like the lines get very blurry, it's still going to be embarrassing as hell, and them not being "real" nudes is not a big comfort when having to confront the fact that there are people masturbating to your "fake" nudes without your consent.
I think in a few years this won't really be a problem because by then these things will be so widespread that no one will care, but right now the people being specifically targeted by this must not be feeling great.
It depends very much on the individual apparently. I don't have a huge data set but there are girls that I know that have had this has happened to them, and some of them have just laughed it off and really not seemed like they cared. But again they were in their mid twenties not 18 or 19.
The draw to these apps is that the user can exploit anyone they want. It's not really about sex, it's about power.
Human society is about power. It is because we can't get past dominance hierarchy that our communities do nothing about schoolyard bullies, or workplace sexual harassment. It is why abstinence-only sex-ed has nothing positive to say to victims of sexual assault, once they make it clear that used goods are used goods.
Our culture agrees by consensus that seeing a woman naked, whether a candid shot, caught inflagrante delicto or rendered from whole cloth by a generative AI system, redefines her as a sexual object, reducing her qualifications as a worker, official or future partner. That's a lot of power to give to some guy with X-ray Specs, and it speaks poorly of how society regards women, or human beings in general.
We disregard sex workers, too.
Violence sucks, but without the social consensus the propagates sexual victimhood, it would just be violence. Sexual violence is extra awful because the rest of society actively participates in making it extra awful.
Dude I can imagine people naked in my head.
Yes I think this ai trend is sad and people who use these service, it says a lot about what kind of person they are. And it also says a lot about what kind of company meta is.
How dare that other person i don't know and will never meet gain sexual stimulation!
My body is not inherently for your sexual simulation. Downloading my picture does not give you the right to turn it in to porn.
You get to tell me what i can and cannot think about in my own head?
WTF?
There is a huge ass difference between your personal thoughts and using a subjects social media, a database of existing nudes and AI to have REAL MEDIA produced.
Seriously, not even remotely similar and its frankly disturbing that this is even your thought process.
If thought crime is a thing, im out.
That is crossing the Rubicon.
There is no harm done to you or your body with an AI generated image or video.
Blackmail and extortion are crimes of their own, as are rape and sexual assault.
But thinking about something and using tools to visualize it are not crimes.
Maybe society overreacts to nudity. Maybe society's attitude to sex needs to change. Maybe opression and regulation of sex has been a major form of control over society and oppression of certain groups.
People are too concerned with their own junk to see the actual issue.
lmao
It's not thoughtcrime you giant crybaby.
This is SUCH a huge leap. You have a right to your thoughts, not databases, programming and services to generate media.
Did you miss what this post is about? In this scenario it’s literally not your body.
There is nothing stopping anyone from using it on my body. Seriously, get a fucking grip.
Do you have nudes out there? Because if not then yes, that would stop people. The ai can’t magically reveal what’s actually under your clothes.
You've lost this argument when you don't even know what the argument is about.
The problem isn't what is actually under because only you or people you choose would know that, the problem is it appears like it's what is actually under your clothes. What do you think people should do, say "That's not what I actually look like naked, this is what I actually look like naked" or something?
Literally yes. As this becomes a more prevalent, widespread issue, eventually we’re going to reach a point where seeing a nude of someone is effectively meaningless, as it’s just as likely that it’s fake as it is real.
This is just a transitional phase. It’s going to be rough for sure, especially with how puritan and judgmental our culture is, but my point stands.
This is such a dumb argument. Nobody is claiming that the AI can show you what's actually beneath a person's clothes. The nudes being fake doesn't resolve the ethical issue of creating porn of people who never agreed to it.
The people doing mental gymnastics about this stuff are just telling on themselves. Don't make fake porn of real people, and if you do, be prepared to be rightfully treated as a sexual predator if anyone finds out.
Scroll back up.
Entirely screw off with this gaslighting BS.
That’s their pitch, it’s their way of advertising to people. The ai isn’t literally psychic. All the ai is doing is guessing by using a database of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of naked bodies, and trying to fill in the blanks based on what it thinks yours probably looks like.
The AI isn’t magic, it doesn’t have the ability to somehow reveal what you look like without knowing. It’s the equivalent of really good photoshop effectively.
You haven't explained anything I didn't already know. Of course it's not psychic nor 100% accurate to real life.
But this is flat out bullshit and wildly disingenuous. You're entirely ignoring the fact that when it's posted that no one but the creator of the deepfake knows its fake. Everyone else just sees a nude. You are playing semantics while ignoring the actual harm.
At this point, I just see you as a troll who isn't interested in any sort of good faith discussion.
I’m not trying to be disingenuous, it genuinely sounded like you didn’t realize, that’s my bad.
Imo as these become widespread, we’ll inevitably reach a point where nudes simply don’t matter. If anyone can create a nude of someone else with next to no effort in seconds, then a nude getting “leaked” would have next to no impact or relevance.
Right now we live in a pretty puritan society, so the transitional phase is going to suck and people are going to be hurt. Obviously that’s awful, and none of this should take away from that fact, I feel horrible for the people negatively impacted by this. And while that’s all true, it’s also true that as we continue going down this road we’ll reach a point where it simply won’t matter anymore.
I think the offense is in the use of their facial likeness far more than their body.
If you took a naked super-sized barbie doll and plastered Taylor Swift's face on it, then presented it to an audience for the purpose of jerking off, the argument "that's not what Taylor's tits look like!" wouldn't save you.
Unregulated advertisement combined with a clickbait model for online marketing is fueling this deluge of creepy shit. This isn't simply a "Computers Evil!" situation. Its much more that a handful of bad actors are running Silicon Valley into the ground.
Not so much computers evil! as just acknowledging there will always be malicious actors who will find clever ways to use technology to cause harm. And yes, there's a gathering of folk on 4Chan/b who nudify (denudify?) submitted pictures, usually of people they know, which, thanks to the process, puts them out on the internet. So this is already a problem.
Think of Murphy's Law as it applies to product stress testing. Eventually, some customer is going to come in having broke the part you thought couldn't be broken. Also, our vast capitalist society is fueled by people figuring out exploits in the system that haven't been patched or criminalized (see the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008). So we have people actively looking to utilize technology in weird ways to monetize it. That folds neatly like paired gears into looking at how tech can cause harm.
As for people's faces, one of the problems of facial recognition as a security tool (say when used by law enforcement to track perps) is the high number of false positives. It turns out we look a whole lot like each other. Though your doppleganger may be in another state and ten inches taller / shorter. In fact, an old (legal!) way of getting explicit shots of celebrities from the late 20th century was to find a look-alike and get them to pose for a song.
As for famous people, fake nudes have been a thing for a while, courtesy of Photoshop or some other digital photo-editing set combined with vast libraries of people. Deepfakes have been around since the late 2010s. So even if generative AI wasn't there (which is still not great for video in motion) there are resources for fabricating content, either explicit or evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.
This is why we are terrified of AI getting out of hand, not because our experts don't know what they're doing, but because the companies are very motivated to be the first to get it done, and that means making the kinds of mistakes that cause pipeline leakage on sacred Potawatomi tribal land.
I mean, I'm increasingly of the opinion that AI is smoke and mirrors. It doesn't work and it isn't going to cause some kind of Great Replacement any more than a 1970s Automat could eliminate the restaurant industry.
Its less the computers themselves and more the fear surrounding them that seem to keep people in line.
The current presumption that generative AI will replace workers is smoke and mirrors, though the response by upper management does show the degree to which they would love to replace their human workforce with machines, or replace their skilled workforce with menial laborers doing simpler (though more tedious) tasks.
If this is regarded as them tipping their hands, we might get regulations that serve the workers of those industries. If we're lucky.
In the meantime, the pursuit of AGI is ongoing, and the LLMs and generative AI projects serve to show some of the tools we have.
It's not even that we'll necessarily know when it happens. It's not like we can detect consciousness (or are even sure what consciousness / self awareness / sentience is). At some point, if we're not careful, we'll make a machine that can deceive and outthink its developers and has the capacity of hostility and aggression.
There's also the scenario (suggested by Randall Munroe) that some ambitious oligarch or plutocrat gains control of a system that can manage an army of autonomous killer robots. Normally such people have to contend with a principal cabinet of people who don't always agree with them. (Hitler and Stalin both had to argue with their generals.) An AI can proceed with a plan undisturbed by its inhumane implications.
hmmm . i’m not sure we will be able to give emotion to something that has no needs, no living body, and doesn’t die. maybe. but it seems to me that emotions are survival tools that develop as beings and their environment develop, in order to keep a species alive. i could be wrong.
I can see how increased integration and automation of various systems consolidates power in fewer and fewer hands. For instance, the ability of Columbia administrators to rapidly identify and deactivate student ID cards and lock hundreds of protesters out of their dorms with the flip of a switch was really eye-opening. That would have been far more difficult to do 20 years ago, when I was in school.
But that's not an AGI issue. That's a "everyone's ability to interact with their environment now requires authentication via a central data hub" issue. And its illusionary. Yes, you're electronically locked out of your dorm, but it doesn't take a lot of savvy to pop through a door that's been propped open with a brick by a friend.
I think this fear heavily underweights how much human labor goes into building, maintaining, and repairing autonomous killer robots. The idea that a singular megalomaniac could command an entire complex system - hell, that the commander could even comprehend the system they intended to hijack - presumes a kind of Evil Genius Leader that never seems to show up IRL.
Meanwhile, there's no shortage of bloodthirsty savages running around Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, butchering civilians and blowing up homes with sadistic glee. You don't need a computer to demonstrate inhumanity towards other people. If anything, its our human-ness that makes this kind of senseless violence possible. Only deep ethnic animus gives you the impulse to diligently march around butchering pregnant women and toddlers, in a region that's gripped by famine and caught in a deadly heat wave.
Would that all the killing machines were run by some giant calculator, rather than a motley assortment of sickos and freaks who consider sadism a fringe benefit of the occupation.
it’s totally smoke and mirrors. i’m amazed that so many people seem to believe it. for a few things, sure. most things? not a chance in hell.
Regardless of what one might think should happen or expect to happen, the actual psychological effect is harmful to the victim. It's like if you walked up to someone and said "I'm imagining you naked" that's still harassment and off-putting to the person, but the image apps have been shown to have much much more severe effects.
It's like the demonstration where they get someone to feel like a rubber hand is theirs, then hit it with a hammer. It's still a negative sensation even if it's not a strictly logical one.
I think half the people who are offended don’t get this.
The other half think that it’s enough to cause hate.
Both arguments rely on enough people being stupid.