Sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift have been circulating on X (formerly Twitter) over the last day in the latest example of the proliferation of AI-generated fake pornography and the challenge of stopping it from spreading.
X’s policies regarding synthetic and manipulated media and nonconsensual nudity both explicitly ban this kind of content from being hosted on the platform.
Wow this is going to be interesting from multiple fronts for me especially.
First, I’m a huge swiftie - and Taylor is probably not going to take this lightly. Who she’s going to target will be a more interesting question. (Shameless plug for !taylorswift@poptalk.scrubbles.tech if you want to join our small community)
Second, as a nerd who has dabbled with generated art - thank you trolls for ruining it for all of us. This is just going to beg for regulations that is going to ruin the generative AI world - as if we didn’t have enough regulations barreling towards the area with copyright issues.
Third, as someone who hates Musk - I hope everything focuses on him and the platform formerly known as Twitter.
This is just going to beg for regulations that is going to ruin the generative AI world
Awesome.
Is that hatred, or fear, that I hear in this comment?
That’s “suppressing theft masquerading as art is awesome” you hear in that comment.
I have an honest question and would like to hear your (and others, of course) opinion:
I get the anger at the models that exist today. DallE, Midjourney and others were trained on millions of images scraped without consent. That itself is legally ambiguous, and will be interesting how courts rule on it (who am I kidding, they’ll go with the corporations). More importantly though, some of it (and increasingly more, as the controversy reached mainstream) was explicitly disallowed by the author to be used as training data. While I don’t think stealing is the right term here, it is without question unethical and should not be tolerated. While I don’t feel as strongly about this as many others do, maybe because I’m not reliant on earning money from my art, I fully agree that this is scummy and should be outlawed.
What I don’t understand is how many people condemn all of generative AI. For me the issue seems to be one of consent and compensation, and ultimately of capitalism.
Would you be okay with generative AI whose training data was vetted to be acquired consentually?
I don’t have a problem with training on copyrighted content provided 1) a person could access that content and use it as the basis of their own art and 2) the derived work would also not infringe on copyright. In other words, if the training data is available for a person to learn from and if a person could make the same content an AI would and it be allowed, then AI should be allowed to do the same. AI should not (as an example) be allowed to simply reproduce a bit-for-bit copy of its training data (provided it wasn’t something trivial that would not be protected under copyright anyway). The same is true for a person. Now, this leaves some protections in place such as: if a person made content and released it to a private audience which are not permitted to redistribute it, then an AI would only be allowed to train off it if it obtained that content with permission in the first place, just like a person. Obtaining it through a third party would not be allowed as that third party did not have permission to redistribute. This means that an AI should not be allowed to use work unless it at minimum had licence to view the work. I don’t think you should be able to restrict your work from being used as training data beyond disallowing viewing entirely though.
I’m open to arguments against this though. My general concern is copyright already allows for substantial restrictions on how you use a work that seem unfair, such as Microsoft disallowing the use of Windows Home and Pro on headless machines/as servers.
With all this said, I think we need to be ready to support those who lose their jobs from this. Losing your job should never be a game over scenario (loss of housing, medical, housing loans, potentially car loans provided you didn’t buy something like a mansion or luxury car).
What I don’t understand is how many people condemn all of generative AI. For me the issue seems to be one of consent and compensation, and ultimately of capitalism.
Would you be okay with generative AI whose training data was vetted to be acquired consentually?
Not if it was used to undercut human artists’ livelihoods.
Hypothetical future where everybody gets UBI and/or AI becomes sentient and able to unionize, maybe we look back at this again.
I don’t think AI has a soul but there no reason it couldn’t be given one.
My initial position was that AI art would be exciting when a more carefully curated training data is used. … But after some talking with friends, I think we’re living in a world that has minimal respect for copyright already, except when a corporation has a problem with it and wants to bring down the hammer of the law.
It does hurt and its easy to be emotional about artists’ livelihoods being threatened by AI, they aren’t the only laborers threatened by job loss to automation, but this one hurts the most.
So now its just up to AI and artists to make interesting art with it. And for artists to adapt to this environment that has automated art tools.
In doesn’t matter. Sophisticated models are open-source and have already been forked and archived beyond all conceivable hope of regulation. There’s no going back.
Are you going to somehow reach into my personal computer and remove the software and models from it?
This is actually an excellent way to trigger faster regulation of fakes. I applaud this.
You can’t regulate something that takes desktop levels of power to make. What are you going to do? Arrest people in China, Russia NK, etc.? Societal change is needed, not regulation.
Societal change is needed, not regulation.
I agree on the regulation, but I don’t think that society is likely to change. Are entertainers going to stop making use of sex appeal?
We could just…not lose our shit if we see slightly too much of someone’s body.
An extra quarter inch of titty just isn’t that big of a deal. We literally all have nipples.
Too bad I’m not on Twitter anymore. Otherwise, I would check some of these out.
I’m against deepfaking others without their consent, but all this coverage has me wondering what the big deal is. Things like this have always existed, what is the difference this time?
Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.
Back in my day we just looked at photoshopped pictures of celebrities like respectable men!
so in twenty years this comment will be “we only ai generated like respectable men” under an article about the formerly Twitter X Friendcorp LinkedIn For Friends headquarters being invaded by naked Taylor swift robots
