this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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There is so much wrong with just the title of this article:
Get the fuck outta here! This two bit blog want to call itself "a 404 Media investigation"? Maybe don't tackle subjects you have no knowledge or expertise in.
Repeat: FOR FREE! No product!
Have you seen Danbooru? Or F95 Zone? This shit is out there, everywhere. Rule 34 has existed for decades. So has the literal site called "Rule 34". You remember that whole Tifa porn video that showed up in an Italian court room? Somebody had to animate that. 3D porn artists takes its donations from Patreon. Are you going to go after Patreon, too?
These dumbasses are describing things like they've been living in a rock for the past 25 years, watching cable TV with no Internet access, just NOW discovered AI porn as their first vice, and decided to write an article about it to get rid of the undeserved guilt of what they found.
What a shitty, pathetic attempt at creating some sort of moral panic.
The danbooru aspect of the "AI" moral panic is what annoys me.
So many of my friends - many of whom are amateur artists - hate computer generated images because the copyright of the artists were violated, and they weren't even asked. And I ate that does kinda suck - but - how did that happen?
Danbooru.
The art had already been "stolen" and was available online for free. Where was their morality then? For the last decade or whatever that danbooru has been up? Danbooru is who violated the copyright, not stable diffusion or whatever.
At least computer generated imagery is different, like, the stuff it was trained on was exactly their art, while this stuff, while might look like theirs, is unique. (And often with a unique number of fingers.)
And, if "copyright" is their real concern, them surely they understand that copyright only protects against someone making a profit of their work, right? Surely they'll have looked into it and they already know that "art" made by models that used copyrighted content for training are provided from being copyrighted themselves, right? And that you can only buy/sell content made from models that are in the copyright clear, surely they know all this?
No, of course not. They don't give a shit about copyright, they just got the ickies from new tech.
I'm guessing that the "marketplace" and "sale" refers to sites like "Mage Space" which charge money per image generated or offer subscriptions. The article mentions that the model trainers also received a percentage of earnings off of the paid renderings using their models.
Obviously you could run these models on your own, but my guess is that the crux of the article is about monetizing the work, rather than just training your own models and sharing the checkpoints.
The article is somewhat interesting as it covers the topic from an outsider's perspective more geared towards how monetization infests open sharing, but yeah the headline is kinda clickbait.
Well, instead of bitching about the AI porn aspect, perhaps they should spend more time talking about how much of a scam it is to charge for AI-generated images.
Compute costs money, it’s more ethical to charge your users than it is to throw shady ads at them which link to malware.
Also buying and eventually replacing expensive hardware. Running AI at scale requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure.
I took their comment to mean running the generation locally is almost free.
Sure, if you have hardware and/or time to generate it client side. I’m just saying that if you run a web service and decide to charge for it, that’s better than most of the alternative monetization strategies.
I get no malware or shady ads when I generate AI images with Stable Diffusion. I don't know what kind of sites or tools you're using where you're getting shady ads, but you're getting ripped off.
Just because something is free it does not mean that there is no marketplace or product. Sozial Media is generally free, but I would still call Facebook, Tiktok or Instagram a product.
Nowadays a lot of industries start out completely free, but move into paid subscription models later.
Okay. There is still no product involved with AI porn.
People buy and sell paintings despite the fact that you could also make paintings pretty easily. You're paying for the time they spent creating it and the expertise it required. Just because some people scan and upload their paintings for free, doesn't mean that all paintings are not products. I don't see why the same couldn't be true for AI porn.
???
You pay in giving up your free time which they sell. Technically we're just working for free and the product is our attention
Well, fuck, I better log off of Lemmy because it costs me too much damn money.
I just wanted to say I love your comment. Your totally correct and I enjoyed the passion in your words. That's how we got to deal with shit article more often. Thx
Yep
I mean that's kind of worse though isn't it? The point I got from this is that people can make porn of celebs, exes, colleagues, whoever, super easy now. Whether you gotta pay or not is beside the point. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation and your point though?
So I can, but I could also do that without AI. People have photoshopped celebrities heads onto porn actors bodies for decades. It doesn't happen as much now because there's no point.
Realistically, what is really changed except for the tools?
Simplicity, barriers of entry, skill requirements? Kinda different to just enter a prompt "such and such actress choking on a dildo" than to photoshop it isn't it? I for one don't know how to do one but could probably figure out the other.
Again I'm just speculating, I don't really know.
This is absolutely accurate. Basically humanity is constantly reducing the cost and skill barriers for tasks and jobs. It's weird that we are now aggressively doing it on creative aspects but that's what has been done and it's making a mess of garbage media and porn that could have happened before but much higher quantities and less oversight/Input from multiple people.
A lot of the stuff you talked about is covered in the article.
If it's free, chances are you're the product. I assume that there is a market for user-generated "prompts" somewhere.
No, that's not how open-source or open-source philosophies work. They share their work because they were able to download other people's work, and sometimes people improve upon their own work.
These aren't corporations. You don't need to immediately jump to capitalistic conclusions. Just jump on Unstable Diffusion Discord or CivitAI yourself. It's all free.
Maybe there's commissions for specific people/poses, cause I certainly couldn't keep a hard on long enough to generate a spakin worth image
I know, I know: "but the website is free" (for now). However, Civit AI, Inc. is not a loose community. There must be something that pays their bills. I wonder what it is.
Yeah, I wonder what that is.
I feel like you're implying people should look into things before making accusations. Like, find out if what they're saying is true before they say it. And that's why no one asked you to the prom.
They’re probably losing money now and just trying to build a user base as a first-mover. They accept donations and subscriptions with fairly minor benefits, but I imagine hosting and serving sizable AI models is not cheap.
They’ll probably have to transition to paid access at some point, but I don’t see it as particularly unethical as they have bills to pay and do attempt to moderate content on the site.
I tend to agree generating adult content of real people is unethical, but probably less so than how a lot of real porn is made. I don’t think there should be open avenues for sharing that kind of stuff online, and their rules should be better enforced.
wholeheartedly disagree. "real porn" is literally made by consenting adult performers. Hence, it's ethical. Generating adult content of real people is (typically) done without the consent of the people involved, thereby making it unethical.
If you don’t think anything unethical happens in the production of porn I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s getting better but exploitation, sex trafficking, revenge porn, etc. have been a thing since pornography was invented.
AI porn at least does not necessarily need to consider consent. Plenty of AI porn involves animated figures or photorealistic humans that don’t represent any identifiable person.
The only hang up I have is producing images of actual people without their consent, and I don’t think it’s a new problem as photoshop has existed for a while.
i'm sorry to tell you but you have swallowed the propaganda from anti-porn/anti-sex work organizations like Exodus Cry and Morality in Media (who now go by the name NCOSE).
Thanks for letting me know. I’m glad that sex workers are never exploited to produce porn.
No problem!
Well, even if that were the case, the "real porn" is still required to train the model in the first place.
So, it's unethical shit on top of what you think was even more unethical.
Sure, and “impossible” meat wouldn’t have existed if people weren’t already eating actual meat. But it’s a better alternative. Porn is not going anywhere. If generative AI means less real people get exploited that’s a win in my book.
This comparison only holds water if impossible meat were composed of bits of rearranged animal meat... Which it isn't.
That's not necessarily a win for everyone. Some people actually like working in the porn industry. Besides that, their likenesses are being stolen and used to produce reproductions and derivative works without consent or compensation.
Also, I think you and your buddies here are missing the plot. Generated porn and generated porn of real people are related but different things. I think that's pretty commonly understood which is why these sites have policies in the first place.
There's a market for commission artists doing this for money since the dawn of art