An AI company has been generating porn with gamers' idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards
An AI company has been generating porn with gamers' idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards
And now I feel like I need to take a shower. Ugh.
Imagine reading that headline 20 years ago.
BOINC came out 21 years ago, so it wouldn't be that unreasonable.
So, it's like folding@home, but instead of donating your spare compute to science, you sell it to generate porn?
Porning@home
Can we at least see it?
This... This was inevitable.
"Selling" it for digital copies of images and some variable tweaks
I’ll be a minority voice considering the other comments. But maybe just pay for onlyfans or whatever you guys use. I’m a generally attractive woman (I can surmise from interactions while trying to date) and I really don’t like the idea that my likeness would be used for something like this. Get your jollies off, but try and be a bit consensual about it. Is that so much to ask?
It isn't too much to ask. According to Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG (Harvard Psychiatrist/Instructor), research shows that the release of non-consensual porn makes the unwilling subjects suicidal over half the time. Non-consensual porn = deepfakes, revenge porn, etc. It's seriously harmful, and there are other effects like depression, shame, PTSD, anxiety, and so on. There is functionally unlimited porn out there that is made with consent, and if someone doesn't want to be publicly sexually explicit then that's their choice.
I'm not against AI porn in general (I consider it the modern version of dirty drawings/cartoons), but when it comes to specific likenesses as with deepfakes then there's clear proof of harm and that's enough for me to oppose it. I don't believe there's some inherent right to see specific people naked against their will.
I think it would be too big of a privacy overreach to try to ban it outright as I think what people do on their own computers is their own business and there's no way to enforce a full ban without being incredibly intrusive, but as soon as it gets distributed in any way I think it should be prosecuted as heavily as real non consensual porn that was taken against someone's will.
I wonder if part of the emotional risk is due to the general social stigma attached to porn. It becomes something that has to be explained and justified.
If done to grand excess, deepfakes could crash the market on that, so to speak. Yeah, everyone saw your face on an AI-generated video. They also saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their Aunt Matilda, and for good measure, Barry Bonds, and that was just a typical Thursday.
The shock value is burnt through, and "I got deepfaked" ends with a social stigma on the level of "I got in a shouting match with a cashier" or "I stumbled into work an hour late recently."
I think the key is a lot of people don't want to pay for porn. And in the case of deep fakes, it's stuff they literally cannot pay money to get.
So I’m not disagreeing with you, but you’re assuming they’re making deepfake images, and the article doesn’t specify that. In fact I’d bet that it’s just AI generated “people” that don’t exist.
What about AI porn of a person that doesn’t exist?
However, one of Salad's clients is CivitAi, a platform for sharing AI generated images which has previously been investigated by 404 media. It found that the service hosts image generating AI models of specific people, whose image can then be combined with pornographic AI models to generate non-consensual sexual images.
I have a question and I hope that people here will discuss this because I really want to understand the general opinion on this.
Is it wrong to deepfake someone without their consent so long as you don’t share the content and it’s all stored locally? I’ve seen this come up and my general opinion is that it isn’t. I know that isn’t the case in the article, just want to hear why people would disagree.
My angle is that doing a deepfake of someone in private hurts zero people and is an extension of fantasy. I don’t see the creation of fake nudes any different than writing fantasy erotica about someone. And I also don’t see it as different than creating fake nude art of them by hand or with photoshop. Like if you do it in your head anyways, which is completely normal, then aren’t we just worried about the outside effects and not the fantasizing itself?
It's at least as wrong as fantasizing about them if they aren't already romantically involved with you.
How wrong that is, is up for debate. It will definitely creep them out and they can never find out about it.
If it's just in your head, at least there's no physical way they could ever find out. You'd have to admit it. But if you have it on your hard drive, a hacker could get it and blackmail you with it, or just distribute it.
So my stance is that there's a non-zero chance of doing harm to them, and so it's wrong. I wouldn't do it. I also wouldn't create it with Photoshop, or by hand, for the same reason.
If you want to jerk off, do it to existing porn, or imaginary people porn. Don't create porn of real people without their permission, even if you think nobody will ever see it other than you. Accidents happen, and they don't deserve to bear the cost of that.
Deepfake pornography is super goony but if I had to look for a silver lining, at least nobody had to undergo the actual physical degradation of making porn. It’s still gross in its own way, but it’s a different kind of gross that seems worse in some ways but better in others.
I don’t know… Am I off base here?
Shouldn't be but I've been down voted here for speaking against deepfakes. Some people really don't want to see the problem with them.
Or...just go out and meet people? Onlyfans just enables perversity to keep spreading and ruining our society.
So... this AI company gets gaming teens to "donate" their computing power, rather than pay for render farms / GPU clouds?
And then oblivious parents pay the power bills, effectively covering the computing costs of the AI porn company?
Sounds completely ethical to me /s.
No no, they're getting copies of digital images out of it. It's a totally fair trade!
Capitalism breeds innovation
This feels exploitative AF on multiple levels.
If I'm reading this right, it's a program that users sign up for to donate their processing power (and can opt in or out of adult content), which is then used by client companies to generate their own users' content? It even says that Salad can't view or moderate the images, so what exactly are they doing wrong besides providing service to potentially questionable companies? It makes as much sense as blaming Nvidia or Microsoft, am I missing something?
Based on the rewards, I'm assuming it's being done by very young people. Presumably the value of rewards is really low, but these kids haven't done the cost-benefit analysis. If I had to guess, for the vast majority it costs more in electricity than they get back, but the parents don't know it's happening.
This could be totally wrong. I haven't looked into it. This is how most of these things work though. They prey on the youth and their desire for these products to take advantage of them.
Honestly what roblox kids are willing to do for pitiful pay is scary, if you work in any kind of creative digital medium those kids will do days of your job for a fiver if any real money at all. It won't be industry quality or anything but damn we got a whole digital version of sending kids down the mines. (And some of these roblox games can have unexpectedly big players behind them exploiting kids)
Right, so it's not like they're being tricked into generating porn or anything. It's not some option that they would have turned off if they'd known about it, they just don't care what's happening because they only want the reward. Again I'm not saying I agree with it or that Salad's right to do it, but if they say that's potentially what it can be used for (and they do because the opt-out is available) then the focus should be on the client companies using the tool for questionable purposes.
so what exactly are they doing wrong besides providing service to potentially questionable companies?
Well I think that is the main point of what is wrong. I think the big question is whether the mature content toggle is on by default or not. The company says it's off, but some users said otherwise. Dunno why the author didn't install it and check.
They said they did.
However, by default the software settings opt users into generating adult content. An option exists to "configure workload types manually" which enables users to uncheck the "Adult Content Workloads" option (via 404 media), however this is easily missed in the setup process, which I duly tested for myself to confirm.
Honestly, and I'm not saying I support what's being done here, the way I see it if you're tech savvy enough to be interested in using a program like this you should be looking through all of the options properly anyway. If users don't care what they're doing and are only interested in the rewards that's kind of on them.
I just think the article is focused on the wrong company, Salad is selling a tool that is being potentially misused by users of their client's service. I can certainly see why that can be a problem, but based on the information given in the article I don't think it's really theirs. If that's ALL Salad's used for then that's a different story.
explain this to a person in 1998
Imagine collecting the smartest people on the planet from 100 years ago and explaining this.
I kinda fail to see the problem. The GPU owner doesn't see what workload they are processing. The pr0n company is willing to pay for GPU power. The GPU owner wants to earn money with his hardware. There's a demand, there's an offer, nobody is getting hurt (ai pr0n is not illegal, at least for now) so let people what they want to do
The problem is that they are clearly targeting minors who don't pay their own electricity bill, and dont even neccessarily have awareness that they are paying for their fortnite skins with their parents money. Also: there is a good chance that the generated pictures are at some point present on in the filesystem of the generating computer, and that alone is a giant can of worms that can even lead to legal troubles, if the person lives in a country where some or all kinds of pronography are illegal.
This is a shitty grift, abusing people who don't understand the consequences of the software.
Agreed. Preying on children who don't understand what they're signing up for is shitty to begin with.
Then, add that deepfake AI porn is unethical and likely illegal (and who knows what other kinds of potentially-illegal images are being generated...)
And, as you point out, the files having existed in the computer could, alone, be illegal.
Then, as and extra fuck you, burning GPU cycles to make AI images is causing CO2 emissions, GPU wear, waste heat that might trigger AC, and other negative externalities too, I'm sure...
It's shit all around.
I don't get the hate for AI porn.
On its own, it's just the same as hate for porn. But there's also deep fake porn, ai porn of real people, and that's potentially far more problematic.
One ethics quandary is AI child porn. It at least provides a non-harmful outlet for an otherwise harmful act, but it could also feed addictions and feel insufficient.
You clearly haven't seen it, nor know anyone affected by it. It's like 99% noncon shit from people who are too creepy for artists to work with.
EDIT: Sums it up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aS97RKjEdI
You would think they would do this to mine Bitcoin too.
Whose to say they aren't doing that on the side?
What? Seems like porn generation is the new crypto mining.
I'd rather have a wealth of new porn around rather than thousands random Blockchains going around.
At least the porn will probably be useful for someone long term haha
Boring Dystopia
This shit is tight. I signed up. I consume porn I might as well help them make it
Eh I agree with the reasonable takes here. Nothing wrong with generating that sort of stuff until it starts resembling the likeliness of a real living person. Then I think it’s just creepy; especially if for some reason you are sharing it 💀
100% that porn is not legal. It's also pretty easy to tell which demographic they're targeting with this.
