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.
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.
To people who aren’t sure if this should be illegal or what the big deal is: according to Harvard clinical psychiatrist and instructor Dr. Alok Kanojia (aka Dr. K from HealthyGamerGG), once non-consensual pornography (which deepfakes are classified as) is made public over half of people involved will have the urge to kill themselves. There’s also extreme risk of feeling depressed, angry, anxiety, etc. The analogy given is it’s like watching video the next day of yourself undergoing sex without consent as if you’d been drugged.
I’ll admit I used to look at celeb deepfakes, but once I saw that video I stopped immediately and avoid it as much as I possibly can. I believe porn can be done correctly with participant protection and respect. Regarding deepfakes/revenge porn though that statistic about suicidal ideation puts it outside of healthy or ethical. Obviously I can’t make that decision for others or purge the internet, but the fact that there’s such regular and extreme harm for the (what I now know are) victims of non-consensual porn makes it personally immoral. Not because of religion or society but because I want my entertainment to be at minimum consensual and hopefully fun and exciting, not killing people or ruining their happiness.
I get that people say this is the new normal, but it’s already resulted in trauma and will almost certainly continue to do so. Maybe even get worse as the deepfakes get more realistic.
once non-consensual pornography (which deepfakes are classified as) is made public over half of people involved will have the urge to kill themselves.
Not saying that they are justified or anything but wouldn’t people stop caring about them when they reach a critical mass? I mean if everyone could make fakes like these, I think people would care less since they can just dismiss them as fakes.
The analogy given is it’s like watching video the next day of yourself undergoing sex without consent as if you’d been drugged.
You want a world where people just desensitise themselves to things that make them want to die through repeated exposure. I think you’ll get a whole lot of complex PTSD instead.
I think this is realistically the only way forward. To delegitimize any kind of nudes that might show up of a person. Which could be good. But I have no doubt that highschools will be flooded with bullies sending porn around of innocent victims. As much as we delegitimize it as a society, it’ll still have an effect. Like social media, though it’s normal for anyone to reach you at any time, It still makes cyber bullying more hurtful.
Well if you are sending nudes to someone in high school you are sending porn to a minor. Which I am pretty confident is illegal already. I just would rather not search for that law.
I’m wondering if this may already be illegal in some countries. Revenge porn laws now exist in some countries, and I’m not sure if the legislation specifies how the material should be produced to qualify. And if the image is based on a minor, that’s often going to be illegal too - some places I hear even pornographic cartoons are illegal if they feature minors. In my mind people who do this shit are doing something pretty similar to putting hidden cameras in bathrooms.
The technology will become available everywhere and run on every device over time. Nothing will stop this
That’s a ripoff. It costs them at most $0.1 to do simple stable diffusion img2img. And most people could do it themselves, they’re purposefully exploiting people who aren’t tech savvy.
it’s a “I don’t know tech” tax
The people being exploited are the ones who are the victims of this, not people who paid for it.
There are many victims, including the perpetrators.
It seems like there’s a news story every month or two about a kid who kills themselves because videos of them are circulating. Or they’re being blackmailed.
I have a really hard time thinking of the people who spend ten bucks making deep fakes of other people as victims.
I have a really hard time thinking
Your lack of imagination doesn’t make the plight of non-consensual AI-generated porn artists any less tragic.
No one’s a victim no one’s being exploited. Same as taping a head on a porno mag.
IDK, $10 seems pretty reasonable to run a script for someone who doesn’t want to. A lot of people have that type of arrangement for a job…
That said, I would absolutely never do this for someone, I’m not making nudes of a real person.
Scam is another thing. Fuck these people selling.
But fuck dude they aren’t taking advantage of anyone buying the service. That’s not how the fucking world works. It turns out that even you have money you can post for people to do shit like clean your house or do an oil change.
NOBODY on that side of the equation are bring exploited 🤣
Wait? This is a tool built into stable diffusion?
In regards to people doing it themselves, it might be a bit too technical for some people to setup. But I’ve never tried stable diffusion.
Porn of Normal People
Why did they feel the need to add that “normal” to the headline?
To differentiate from celebrities.
Because it’s different to somebody going online and finding a stock picture of Taylor Swift
People who have Wikipedia articles have less of an expectation of privacy than normal people
This telegram user has a hard stance on “weirdos”.
We are acting as if through out history we managed to orient technology so as to to only keep the benefits and eliminate negative effects. while in reality most of the technology we use still comes with both aspects. and it is not gonna be different with AI.
I’d like to share my initial opinion here. “non consential Ai generated nudes” is technically a freedom, no? Like, we can bastardize our president’s, paste peoples photos on devils or other characters, why is Ai nudes where the line is drawn? The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.
It’s a far cry from making weird memes to making actual porn. Especially when it’s not easily seen as fake.
I think their point is where is the line and why is the line where it is?
Psychological trauma. Normal people aren’t used to dealing with that and even celebrities seek help for it. Throw in the transition period where this technology is not widely known and you have careers on the line too.
Seems to fall under any other form of legal public humiliation to me, UNLESS it is purported to be true or genuine. I think if there’s a clear AI watermark or artists signature that’s free speech. If not, it falls under Libel - false and defamatory statements or facts, published as truth. Any harmful deep fake released as truth should be prosecuted as Libel or Slander, whether it’s sexual or not.
I think the biggest thing with that is trump and Putin live public lives. They live lives scrutinized by media and the public. They bought into those lives, they chose them. Due to that, there are certain things that we push that they wouldn’t necessarily be illegal if we did them to a normal, private citizen, but because your life is already public we turn a bit of a blind eye. And yes, this applies to celebrities, too.
I don’t necessarily think the above is a good thing, I think everyone should be entitled to some privacy, having the same thing done to a normal person living a private life is a MUCH more clear violation of privacy.
The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.
And is that OK? I mean I get it, free speech, but just because congress can’t stop you from expressing something doesn’t mean you actually should do it. It’s basically bullying.
Imagine you meet someone you really like at a party, they like you too and look you up on a social network… and find galleries of hardcore porn with you as the star. Only you’re not a porn star, those galleries were created by someone who specifically wanted to hurt you.
AI porn without consent is clearly illegal in almost every country in the world, and the ones where it’s not illegal yet it will be illegal soon. The 1st amendment will be a stumbling block, but it’s not an impenetrable wall - congress can pass laws that limit speech in certain edge cases, and this will be one of them.
The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.
And is that OK?
I’m going to jump in on this one and say yes - it’s mostly fine.
I look at these things through the lens of the harm they do and the benefits they deliver - consequentialism and act utilitarianism.
The benefits are artistic, comedic and political.
The “harm” is that Putin and or Trump might feel bad, maaaaaaybe enough that they’d kill themselves. All that gets put back up under benefits as far as I’m concerned - they’re both extremely powerful monsters that have done and will continue to do incredible harm.
The real harm is that such works risk normalising this treatment of regular folk, which is genuinely harmful. I think that’s unlikely, but it’s impossible to rule out.
Similarly, the dissemination of the kinds of AI fakes under discussion is a negative because they do serious,measurable harm.
Public figures vs private figures. Fair or not a public figure is usually open season. Go ahead and make a comic where Ben Stein rides a horse home to his love nest with Ben Stiller.
Lemme put it this way. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of consequences. You talk shit, you’re gonna get hit. Is it truly freedom if you’re infringing on someone else’s rights?
Yeah you don’t have the right to prevent people from drawing pictures of you, but you do have the right not to get hit by some guy you’re drawing.
They’re making pornography of women who are not consenting to it when that is an extremely invasive thing to do that has massive social consequences for women and girls. This could (and almost certainly will) be used on kids too right, this can literally be a tool for the production of child pornography.
Even with regards to adults, do you think this will be used exclusively on public figures? Do you think people aren’t taking pictures of their classmates, of their co-workers, of women and girls they personally know and having this done to pictures of them? It’s fucking disgusting, and horrifying. Have you ever heard of the correlation between revenge porn and suicide? People literally end their lives when pornographic material of them is made and spread without their knowledge and consent. It’s terrifyingly invasive and exploitative. It absolutely can and must be illegal to do this.
It absolutely can and must be illegal to do this.
Given that it can be done in a private context and there is absolutely no way to enforce it without looking into random people’s computer unless they post it online publicly, you’re just asking for a new law to reassure people with no effect. That’s useless.
Strange of you to respond to a comment about the fakes being shared in this way…
Do you have the same prescriptions in relation to someone with a stash of CSAM, and if not, why not?
No. Because in one case, someone ran a program on his computer and the output might hurt someone else feelings if they ever find out, and in the other case people/kid were exploited for sexual purpose to begin with and their live torn appart regardless of the diffusion of the stuff?
How is that a hard concept to understand?
How can you describe your friends, family, co-workers, peers, making and sharing pornography of you, and say that it comes down to hurt feelings??? It’s taking someone’s personhood, their likeness, their autonomy, their privacy, and reducing them down to a sexual act for which they provide no knowledge or consent. And you think this stays private?? Are you kidding me?? Men have literally been caught making snapchat groups dedicated to sharing their partner’s nudes without their consent. You either have no idea what you’re talking about or you are intentionally downplaying the seriousness of what this is. Like I said in my original comment, people contemplate and attempt suicide when pornographic content is made and shared of them without their knowledge and consent. This is an incredibly serious discussion.
It is people like you, yes you specifically, that provide the framework by which the sexual abuse of women is justified.
Don’t get me wrong it’s unsettling, but I agree, I don’t see the initial harm. I see it as creating a physical manifestation of someone’s inner thoughts. I can definitely see how it could become or encourage dangerous situations, but that’s like banning alcohol because it could lead to drunk driving or sexual assault.
Innocently drinking alcohol is in NO WAY compared to creating deepfakes of people without consent.
One is an innocent act that has potentially harsh consequences, the other is a disgusting and invasively violating act that has the potential to ruin an innocent persons life.
It’s stuff like this that makes me against copyright laws. To me it is clear and obvious that you own your own image, and it is far less obvious to me that a company can own an image whose creator drew multiple decades ago that everyone can identify. And yet one is protected and the other isn’t.
What the hell do you own if not yourself? How come a corporation has more rights than we do?
As long as there are simps, there will always be this bullshit. And there will always be simps, because it isn’t illegal to be pathetic.
Oooo puter’ bobs and vagenes. Scissor me timbers that gets me hot n bothered
It’s gonna suck no matter what once the technology became available. Perhaps in a bunch of generations there will be a massive cultural shift to something less toxic.
May as well drink the poison if I’m gonna be immersed in it. Cheers.
I was really hoping that with the onset of AI people would be more skeptical of content they see online.
This was one of the reasons. I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent people from acting like this, but what we can do as a society is adjust to it so that it’s not as harmful. I’m still hoping that the eventual onset of it becoming easily accessible and useable will help people to look at all content much more closely.
God, generative ai is such a fucking caustic technology. I honestly don’t see anything positive and not disgusting enabled by this tech.
Edit: I see people don’t agree, but like why can’t ai stick to translating stuff and being useful rather than making horrifically unethical porn, taking the humanity out of art, and replacing peoples jobs with statistical content generation. I hate it here.
I say stop antagonizing the AI.
The only difference between a skilled artist making it with Photoshop and someone using a Neural Net, is the amount of time and effort put into creating the instance.If there are to be any laws against these, they need to apply to any and every fake that’s convincing enough, no matter the technology used.
Don’t blame the gunpowder for the dead person.
People were being killed by thrown stones before that.The laws that oppress us on a daily basis suck ass I’ll give yall that for fucking sure… but downvoting someone wishing for the law equally being applied to all?
Maybe I should go back to 4chan.
OooOo!
That’s some high number of dwnv0t3s!
I wouldn’t have realised unless you had replied here.Nice, but it’s also good that everyone is at least free to downvote and see the number of downvotes, unlike YouTube.
All over history, there has been this trend of people misusing technology and then blaming the technology instead of those that misuse it. This trend is detrimental to the technological progress of a civilisation and is one of the driving forces, causing the cycle that our civilisation is stuck in (of losing all tech and history every once a while and then having to start over from the dark ages).
Technology, gives someone the ability to do something, but it is their will that makes them want to do so. If the “something” is considered “bad” for society, then instead of taking away the ability, we need to insist on getting the person to understand, why and how, said “something” is a problem for the society.Until this problem is fixed, we are going to be stuck at the barrier and the next levels of civilisation shall stay a part of Fiction.
The root problem is government not enforcing the law on internet. Deepfakes existed for years.
The law enforcement should be more proactive on internet.This business is going to get out of control. It’s going to get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.
Every time this comes up, all the tech nerds here like to excuse it as fine and not a bad thing at all. I am hoping this won’t happen this time, but knowing lemmys audience…
I think part of the difficulty discussing this is the discussions usually combine two different things. The production and distribution.
I was informed elsewhere in this thread people can already produce these images/videos on their own machines with no third parties involved or remote processing. I can’t think of a single thing that can be done about that so acceptance is all we’ve got.
Nonconsensual sharing, on the other hand, we can and should do something about. The legal system won’t be able to stop it altogether but it can push it to the fringes and stop it from becoming mainstream so any victims wouldn’t see fake images/videos of themselves proliferating everywhere.
The Lemmy circlejerk is real, but excusing deep fake porn is pretty off brand for us. I’m glad the comments on this post are uniformly negative.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/10397565
https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/927248/-/comment/5921190 just accept it as a new normal, it’s fine. Can’t possible have any recourse, just accept it women of the world, it’s the new normal!
Okay, there are a couple of douche canoes, but generally speaking, I think we’re okay on this one.
It is massively upvoted (for lemmy).
It’s not a matter of excusing it. Distribution of someone’s picture without their explicit consent, and anything like that, is inexcusable. But we’re talking about the generation of said content, which technically can’t be stopped without seriously restraining everything.
I’m not saying it’s not a bad thing but it’s inevitable. The problem will just be getting worse and there’s no stopping it. It’s something we’re just going to need to accept as a new normal. If we can deal with living under the constant threat of nuclear armageddon then I think we can live with fake nudes aswell.
Yeah it’s this shit I’m talking about. We have a whole legal and justice system to deal with this. No kne needs to accept sexual abuse as a new normal. This shit is weird.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be consequences for someone who is spreading these pictures with the intention to cause harm to someone’s reputation but it’s incredibly naive to think that the justice system is going to stop deepfakes when it can’t even prevent bike theft. 12 year olds are making these with their smartphones. The technology is extremely accessible and easy to use and that is not going to change. I’m sorry but you’re not putting the toothpaste back into the tube. Wait a few years and you can generate photorealistic porn videos of anyone you want.
We can’t stop biketheft so fuck off women, your free game coz this guy said so.
When you start strawmanning you’ve already lost the argument.
You might want to look up what strawmanning means. I’m just flat out mocking what you said.
No we don’t. What is happening here is not covered by current laws.