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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Totally get your frustration, but people have been imagining, drawing, and photoshopping people naked since forever. To me the problem is if they try and pass it off as real. If someone can draw photorealistic pieces and drew someone naked, we wouldn’t have the same reaction, right?
It takes years of pratice to draw photorealism, and days if not weeks to draw a particular piece. Which is absolutely not the same to any jackass with an net connection and 5 minutes to create a equally/more realistic version.
It’s really upsetting that this argument keeps getting brought up. Because while guys are being philosophical about how it’s therotically the same thing, women are experiencing real world harm and harassment from these services. Women get fired for having nudes, girls are being blackmailed and bullied with this shit.
But since it’s theoretically always been possible somehow churning through any woman you find on Instagram isn’t an issue.
Do you? Since you aren’t threatened by this, yet another way for women to be harassed is just a fun little thought experiment.
Well that’s exactly the point from my perspective. It’s really shitty here in the stage of technology where people are falling victim to this. So I really understand people’s knee jerk reaction to throw on the brakes. But then we’ll stay here where women are being harassed and bullied with this kind of technology. The only paths forward, theoretically, are to remove it all together or to make it ubiquitous background noise. Removing it all together, in my opinion, is practically impossible.
So my point is that a picture from an unverified source can never be taken as truth. But we’re in a weird place technologically, where unfortunately it is. I think we’re finally reaching a point where we can break free of that. If someone sends me a nude with my face on it like, “Is this you?!!”. I’ll send them one back with their face like, “Is tHiS YoU?!??!”.
We’ll be in a place where we as a society cannot function taking everything we see on the internet is truth. Not only does this solve the AI nude problem, It can solve the actual nude leaks, other forms of cyberbullying, and mass distribution of misinformation as a whole. The internet hasn’t been a reliable source of information since its inception. The problem is, up until now, its been just plausible enough that the gullible fall into believing it.
I don’t think you are accounting for ease of use. It took time and skill for an individual to photoshop someone else. This is just an app. It takes more effort to prove the truth, then it does to create a lie. Not to mention, how in the other article it explains that people are using this to bait children. :/
And this universal truth, that’s existed since the dawn of time, will now have to be reckoned with. The ease of use is exactly its undoing as something that has power over us. When anyone can do it, it all just becomes background noise.
You don’t think it’s easy for someone to simply imagine another naked? That’s no different than this - it’s all a fantasy. None of it’s real.
There is a huge ass difference between your imagination and REAL MEDIA using my face. This is a absolute bullshit justification.
How? In my mind, for this scenario, I can picture your face literally perfectly. It is, for all intents and purposes, your real face. In this case what I imagine in my head is identical to what some ai model would churn out.
Is a picture no different than an immigration? Is CGI not a picture because it used a computer?
Of course not because REAL MEDIA is being produced. Your thoughts never leave your head, these images are being used to harass and blackmail women. Your argument is completely asinine.
Hold up, that’s a separate issue. Revenge porn is flat out illegal, so using nudes of people, real or not, as blackmail, isn’t up for debate here. Whether or not it’s obvious, and I’m sorry if it’s not, I’m 100% with you that that’s completely disgusting and shouldn’t be tolerated.
Back to the first part though, is the problem literally just that it exists outside of the persons head? If they don’t share it with anyone, what’s really the difference from them imagining it? In both scenarios they’re effectively getting the same result, and nobody else is affected.
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’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.
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.