- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 as truth. Not only does this potentially solve the AI nude problem, It can solve the actual nude leaks / revenge porn, 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.
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.