- 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.
You must log in or register to comment.
Yet another example of multi billion dollar companies that don’t curate their content because it’s too hard and expensive. Well too bad maybe you only profit 46 billion instead of 55 billion. Boo hoo.
It’s not that it’s too expensive, it’s that they don’t care. They won’t do the right thing until and unless they are forced to, or it affects their bottom line.
An economic entity cannot care, I don’t understand how people expect them to. They are not human
Economic Entities aren’t robots, they’re collections of people engaged in the act of production, marketing, and distribution. If this ad/product exists, its because people made it exist deliberately.
No they are slaves to the entity.
They can be replaced
Everyone from top to bottom can be replaced
And will be unless they obey the machine’s will
It’s crazy talk to deny this fact because it feels wrong
It’s just the truth and yeah, it’s wrong
Everyone from top to bottom can be replaced
Once you enter the actual business sector and find out how much information is siloed or sequestered in the hands of a few power users, I think you’re going to be disappointed to discover this has never been true.
More than one business has failed because a key member of the team left, got an ill-conceived promotion, or died.
Well too bad maybe you only profit 46 billion instead of 55 billion.
I can’t possibly imagine this quality of clickbait is bringing in $9B annually.
Maybe I’m wrong. But this feels like the sort of thing a business does when its trying to juice the same lemon for the fourth or fifth time.
This is not okay, but this is nowhere near the most harmful application of AI.
The most harmful application of AI that I can think of would disrupting a country’s entire culture via gaslighting social media bots, leading to increases in addiction, hatred, suicide, and murder.
Putting hundreds of millions of people into a state of hopeless depression would be more harmful than creating a picture of a naked woman with a real woman’s face on it.
Isn’t that happening? I assumed it was.
Seen similar stuff on TikTok.
That’s the big problem with ad marketplaces and automation, the ads are rarely vetted by a human, you can just give them money, upload your ad and they’ll happily display it. They rely entirely on users to report them which most people don’t do because they’re ads and they wont take it down unless it’s really bad.
It’s especially bad on reels/shorts for pretty much all platforms. Tons of financial scams looking to steal personal info or worse. And I had one on a Facebook reel that was for boner pills that was legit a minute long ad of hardcore porn. Not just nudity but straight up uncensored fucking.
Is there such a thing as a consensual undressing app? Seems redundant
I assume that’s what you’d call OnlyFans.
That said, the irony of these apps is that its not the nudity that’s the problem, strictly speaking. Its taking someone’s likeness and plastering it on a digital manikin. What social media has done has become the online equivalent of going through a girl’s trash to find an old comb, pulling the hair off, and putting it on a barbie doll that you then use to jerk/jill off.
What was the domain of 1980s perverts from comedies about awkward high schoolers has now become a commodity we’re supposed to treat as normal.
Idk how many people are viewing this as normal, I think most of us recognize all of this as being incredibly weird and creepy.
Idk how many people are viewing this as normal
Maybe not “Lemmy” us. But the folks who went hog wild during The Fappening, combined with younger people who are coming into contact with pornography for the first time, make a ripe base of users who will consider this the new normal.
It’s all so incredibly gross. Using “AI” to undress someone you know is extremely fucked up. Please don’t do that.
Would it be any different if you learn how to sketch or photoshop and do it yourself?
This is also fucking creepy. Don’t do this.
But yet, we’ve (almost) all imagined someone we know naked.
You say that as if photoshopping someone naked isnt fucking creepy as well.
Can you articulate why, if it is for private consumption?
Consent.
You might be fine with having erotic materials made of your likeness, and maybe even of your partners, parents, and children. But shouldn’t they have right not to be objectified as wank material?
I partly agree with you though, it’s interesting that making an image is so much more troubling than having a fantasy of them. My thinking is that it is external, real, and thus more permanent even if it wouldn’t be saved, lost, hacked, sold, used for defamation and/or just shared.
To add to this:
Imagine someone would sneak into your home and steal your shoes, socks and underwear just to get off on that or give it to someone who does.
Wouldn’t that feel wrong? Wouldn’t you feel violated? It’s the same with such AI porn tools. You serve to satisfy the sexual desires of someone else and you are given no choice. Whether you want it or not, you are becoming part of their act. Becoming an unwilling participant in such a way can feel similarly violating.
They are painting and using a picture of you, which is not as you would like to represent yourself. You don’t have control over this and thus, feel violated.
This reminds me of that fetish, where one person is basically acting like a submissive pet and gets treated like one by their “master”. They get aroused by doing that in public, one walking with the other on a leash like a dog on hands and knees. People around them become passive participants of that spectactle. And those often feel violated. Becoming unwillingly, unasked a participant, either active or passive, in the sexual act of someone else and having no or not much control over it, feels wrong and violating for a lot of people.
In principle that even shares some similarities to rape.There are countries where you can’t just take pictures of someone without asking them beforehand. Also there are certain rules on how such a picture can be used. Those countries acknowledge and protect the individual’s right to their image.
Just to play devils advocate here, in both of these scenarios:
Imagine someone would sneak into your home and steal your shoes, socks and underwear just to get off on that or give it to someone who does.
This reminds me of that fetish, where one person is basically acting like a submissive pet and gets treated like one by their “master”. They get aroused by doing that in public, one walking with the other on a leash like a dog on hands and knees. People around them become passive participants of that spectactle. And those often feel violated.
The person has the knowledge that this is going on. In he situation with AI nudes, the actual person may never find out.
Again, not to defend this at all, I think it’s creepy af. But I don’t think your arguments were particularly strong in supporting the AI nudes issue.
In every chat I find about this, I see people railing against AI tools like this but I have yet to hear an argument that makes much sense to me about it. I don’t care much either way but I want a grounded position.
I care about harms to people and in general, people should be free to do what they want until it begins harming someone. And then we get to have a nuanced conversation about it.
I’ve come up with a hypothetical. Let’s say that you write naughty stuff about someone in your diary. The diary is kept in a secure place and in private. Then, a burglar breaks in and steals your diary and mails that page to whomever you wrote it about. Are you, the writer, in the wrong?
My argument would be no. You are expressing a desire in private and only through the malice of someone else was the harm done. And no, being “creepy” isn’t an argument either. The consent thing I can maybe see but again do you have a right not to be fantasized about? Not to be written about in private?
I’m interested in people’s thoughts because this argument bugs me not to have a good answer for.
Yeah it’s an interesting problem.
If we go down the path of ideas in the mind and the representations we create and visualize in our mind’s eye, to forbid people from conceiving of others sexually means there really is no justification for conceiving of people generally.
If we try to seek for a justification, where is that line drawn? What is sexual, and what is general? How do we enforce this, or at least how do we catch people in the act and shame them into stopping their behavior, especially if we don’t possess the capability of telepathy?
What is harm? Is it purely physical, or also psychological? Is there a degree of harm that should be allowed, or that is inescapable despite our best intentions?
The angle that you point out regarding writing things down about people in private can also go different ways. I write things down about my friends because my memory sucks sometimes and I like to keep info in my back pocket for when birthdays, holidays, or special occasions come. What if I collected information about people that I don’t know? What if I studied academics who died in the past to learn about their lives, like Ben Franklin? What if I investigated my neighbors by pointing cameras at their houses, or installing network sniffers or other devices to try to collect information on them? Does the degree of familiarity with those people I collect information about matter, or is the act wrong in and of itself? And do my intentions justify my actions, or do the consequences of said actions justify them?
Obviously I think it’s a good thing that we as a society try to discourage collecting information on people who don’t want that information collected, but there is a portion of our society specifically allowed to do this: the state. What makes their status deserving of this power? Can this power be used for ill and good purposes? Is there a level of cross collection that can promote trust and collaboration between the state and its public, or even amongst the public itself? I would say that there is a level where if someone or some group knows enough about me, it gets creepy.
Anyways, lots of questions and no real answers! I’d be interested in learning more about this subject, and I apologize if I steered the convo away from sexual harassment and violation. Consent extends to all parts of our lives, but sexual consent does seem to be a bigger problem given the evidence of this post. Looking forward to learning more!
I think we’ve just stumbled on an issue where the rubber meets the road as far as our philosophies about privacy and consent. I view consent as important mostly in areas that pertain to bodily autonomy right? So we give people the rights to use our likeness for profit or promotion or distribution. And what we’re giving people is a mental permission slip to utilize the idea of the body or the body itself for specific purposes.
However, I don’t think that these things really pertain to private matters. Because the consent issue only applies when there are potential effects on the other person. Like if I talk about celebrities and say that imagining a celebrity sexually does no damage because you don’t know them, I think most people would agree. And so if what we care about is harm, there is no potential for harm.
With surveillance matters, the consent does matter because we view breaching privacy as potential harm. The reason it doesn’t apply to AI nudes is that privacy is not being breached. The photos aren’t real. So it’s just a fantasy of a breach of privacy.
So for instance if you do know the person and involve them sexually without their consent, that’s blatantly wrong. But if you imagine them, that doesn’t involve them at all. Is it wrong to create material imaginations of someone sexually? I’d argue it’s only wrong if there is potential for harm and since the tech is already here, I actually view that potential for harm as decreasing in a way. The same is true nonsexually. Is it wrong to deepfake friends into viral videos and post them on twitter? Can be. Depends. But do it in private? I don’t see an issue.
The problem I see is the public stuff. People sharing it. And it’s already too late to stop most of the private stuff. Instead we should focus on stopping AI porn from being shared and posted and create higher punishments for ANYONE who does so. The impact of fake nudes and real nudes is very similar, so just take them similarly seriously.
What I find interesting is that for me personally, writing the fantasy down (rather than referring to it) is against the norm, a.k.a. weird, but not wrong.
Painting a painting of it is weird and iffy, hanging it in your home is not ok.
It’s strange how it changes along that progression, but I can’t rightly say why.
Good, let all celebs come together and sue zuck into the ground
Its funny how many people leapt to the defense of Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 Section 230 liability protection, as this helps shield social media firms from assuming liability for shit like this.
Sort of the Heads-I-Win / Tails-You-Lose nature of modern business-friendly legislation and courts.
