A Telegram user who advertises their services on Twitter will create an AI-generated pornographic image of anyone in the world for as little as $10 if users send them pictures of that person. Like many other Telegram communities and users producing nonconsensual AI-generated sexual images, this user creates fake nude images of celebrities, including images of minors in swimsuits, but is particularly notable because it plainly and openly shows one of the most severe harms of generative AI tools: easily creating nonconsensual pornography of ordinary people.

  • GrymEdm@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    To people who aren’t sure if this should be illegal or what the big deal is: according to Harvard clinical psychiatrist and instructor Dr. Alok Kanojia (aka Dr. K from HealthyGamerGG), once non-consensual pornography (which deepfakes are classified as) is made public over half of people involved will have the urge to kill themselves. There’s also extreme risk of feeling depressed, angry, anxiety, etc. The analogy given is it’s like watching video the next day of yourself undergoing sex without consent as if you’d been drugged.

    I’ll admit I used to look at celeb deepfakes, but once I saw that video I stopped immediately and avoid it as much as I possibly can. I believe porn can be done correctly with participant protection and respect. Regarding deepfakes/revenge porn though that statistic about suicidal ideation puts it outside of healthy or ethical. Obviously I can’t make that decision for others or purge the internet, but the fact that there’s such regular and extreme harm for the (what I now know are) victims of non-consensual porn makes it personally immoral. Not because of religion or society but because I want my entertainment to be at minimum consensual and hopefully fun and exciting, not killing people or ruining their happiness.

    I get that people say this is the new normal, but it’s already resulted in trauma and will almost certainly continue to do so. Maybe even get worse as the deepfakes get more realistic.

    • lud@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      once non-consensual pornography (which deepfakes are classified as) is made public over half of people involved will have the urge to kill themselves.

      Not saying that they are justified or anything but wouldn’t people stop caring about them when they reach a critical mass? I mean if everyone could make fakes like these, I think people would care less since they can just dismiss them as fakes.

      • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        The analogy given is it’s like watching video the next day of yourself undergoing sex without consent as if you’d been drugged.

        You want a world where people just desensitise themselves to things that make them want to die through repeated exposure. I think you’ll get a whole lot of complex PTSD instead.

        • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
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          7 months ago

          People used to think their lives are over if they were caught alone with someone of the opposite sex they’re not married to. That is no longer the case in western countries due to normalisation.

          The thing that makes them want to die is societal pressure, not the act itself. In this case, if societal pressure from having fake nudes of yourself spread is removed, most of the harm done to people should be neutralised.

          • too_much_too_soon@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Agreed.

            "I’ve been in HR since '95, so yeah, I’m old, lol. Noticed a shift in how we view old social media posts? Those wild nights you don’t remember but got posted? If they’re at least a decade old, they’re not as big a deal now. But if it was super illegal, immoral, or harmful, you’re still in trouble.

            As for nudes, they can be both the problem and the solution.

            To sum it up, like in the animate movie ‘The Incredibles’: ‘If everyone’s special, then no one is.’ If no image can be trusted, no excuse can be doubted. ‘It wasn’t me’ becomes the go-to, and nobody needs to feel ashamed or suicidal over something fake that happens to many.

            Of course, this is oversimplifying things in the real world but society will adjust. People won’t kill themselves over this. It might even be a good thing for those on the cusp of AI and improper real world behaviours - ‘Its not me. Its clearly AI, I would never behave so outrageously’.

          • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            The thing that makes them want to die is societal pressure, not the act itself.

            That’s an assumption that you have no evidence for. You are deciding what feelings people should have by your own personal rules and completely ignoring the people who are saying this is a violation. What gives you the right to tell people how they are allowed to feel?

    • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I’m wondering if this may already be illegal in some countries. Revenge porn laws now exist in some countries, and I’m not sure if the legislation specifies how the material should be produced to qualify. And if the image is based on a minor, that’s often going to be illegal too - some places I hear even pornographic cartoons are illegal if they feature minors. In my mind people who do this shit are doing something pretty similar to putting hidden cameras in bathrooms.

    • spez_@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The technology will become available everywhere and run on every device over time. Nothing will stop this

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    That’s a ripoff. It costs them at most $0.1 to do simple stable diffusion img2img. And most people could do it themselves, they’re purposefully exploiting people who aren’t tech savvy.

    • echo64@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The people being exploited are the ones who are the victims of this, not people who paid for it.

      • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        No one’s a victim no one’s being exploited. Same as taping a head on a porno mag.

    • IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Scam is another thing. Fuck these people selling.

      But fuck dude they aren’t taking advantage of anyone buying the service. That’s not how the fucking world works. It turns out that even you have money you can post for people to do shit like clean your house or do an oil change.

      NOBODY on that side of the equation are bring exploited 🤣

    • OKRainbowKid@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      In my experience with SD, getting images that aren’t obviously “wrong” in some way takes multiple iterations with quite some time spent tuning prompts and parameters.

  • flower3@feddit.de
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    7 months ago

    I doubt tbh that this is the most severe harm of generative AI tools lol

    • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Pretty sure we will see fake political candidates that actually garner votes soon here.

  • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Porn of Normal People

    Why did they feel the need to add that “normal” to the headline?

  • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I’d like to share my initial opinion here. “non consential Ai generated nudes” is technically a freedom, no? Like, we can bastardize our president’s, paste peoples photos on devils or other characters, why is Ai nudes where the line is drawn? The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It’s a far cry from making weird memes to making actual porn. Especially when it’s not easily seen as fake.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Psychological trauma. Normal people aren’t used to dealing with that and even celebrities seek help for it. Throw in the transition period where this technology is not widely known and you have careers on the line too.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.

      And is that OK? I mean I get it, free speech, but just because congress can’t stop you from expressing something doesn’t mean you actually should do it. It’s basically bullying.

      Imagine you meet someone you really like at a party, they like you too and look you up on a social network… and find galleries of hardcore porn with you as the star. Only you’re not a porn star, those galleries were created by someone who specifically wanted to hurt you.

      AI porn without consent is clearly illegal in almost every country in the world, and the ones where it’s not illegal yet it will be illegal soon. The 1st amendment will be a stumbling block, but it’s not an impenetrable wall - congress can pass laws that limit speech in certain edge cases, and this will be one of them.

      • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        The internet made photos of trump and putin kissing shirtless.

        And is that OK?

        I’m going to jump in on this one and say yes - it’s mostly fine.

        I look at these things through the lens of the harm they do and the benefits they deliver - consequentialism and act utilitarianism.

        The benefits are artistic, comedic and political.

        The “harm” is that Putin and or Trump might feel bad, maaaaaaybe enough that they’d kill themselves. All that gets put back up under benefits as far as I’m concerned - they’re both extremely powerful monsters that have done and will continue to do incredible harm.

        The real harm is that such works risk normalising this treatment of regular folk, which is genuinely harmful. I think that’s unlikely, but it’s impossible to rule out.

        Similarly, the dissemination of the kinds of AI fakes under discussion is a negative because they do serious,measurable harm.

        • Mananasi@feddit.nl
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          7 months ago

          I think that is okay because there was no intent to create pornography there. It is a political statement. As far as I am concerned that falls under free speech. It is completely different from creating nudes of random people/celebrities with the sole purpose of wanking off to it.

            • RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              The difference is that the image is fake but you can’t really see that its fake. Its so easily created using these tools and can be used to harm people.

              The issue isn’t that you’re jerking off to it. The issue is it can create fake photos of situations of people that can be incredibly difficult to deny it really happened.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Public figures vs private figures. Fair or not a public figure is usually open season. Go ahead and make a comic where Ben Stein rides a horse home to his love nest with Ben Stiller.

    • UsernameIsTooLon@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Lemme put it this way. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of consequences. You talk shit, you’re gonna get hit. Is it truly freedom if you’re infringing on someone else’s rights?

      • John_McMurray@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Yeah you don’t have the right to prevent people from drawing pictures of you, but you do have the right not to get hit by some guy you’re drawing.

    • GhostTheToast@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Don’t get me wrong it’s unsettling, but I agree, I don’t see the initial harm. I see it as creating a physical manifestation of someone’s inner thoughts. I can definitely see how it could become or encourage dangerous situations, but that’s like banning alcohol because it could lead to drunk driving or sexual assault.

  • Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It’s gonna suck no matter what once the technology became available. Perhaps in a bunch of generations there will be a massive cultural shift to something less toxic.

    May as well drink the poison if I’m gonna be immersed in it. Cheers.

    • VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I was really hoping that with the onset of AI people would be more skeptical of content they see online.

      This was one of the reasons. I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent people from acting like this, but what we can do as a society is adjust to it so that it’s not as harmful. I’m still hoping that the eventual onset of it becoming easily accessible and useable will help people to look at all content much more closely.

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It’s stuff like this that makes me against copyright laws. To me it is clear and obvious that you own your own image, and it is far less obvious to me that a company can own an image whose creator drew multiple decades ago that everyone can identify. And yet one is protected and the other isn’t.

    What the hell do you own if not yourself? How come a corporation has more rights than we do?

  • Cris@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    God, generative ai is such a fucking caustic technology. I honestly don’t see anything positive and not disgusting enabled by this tech.

    Edit: I see people don’t agree, but like why can’t ai stick to translating stuff and being useful rather than making horrifically unethical porn, taking the humanity out of art, and replacing peoples jobs with statistical content generation. I hate it here.

  • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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    7 months ago

    I say stop antagonizing the AI.
    The only difference between a skilled artist making it with Photoshop and someone using a Neural Net, is the amount of time and effort put into creating the instance.

    If there are to be any laws against these, they need to apply to any and every fake that’s convincing enough, no matter the technology used.


    Don’t blame the gunpowder for the dead person.
    People were being killed by thrown stones before that.

    • Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The laws that oppress us on a daily basis suck ass I’ll give yall that for fucking sure… but downvoting someone wishing for the law equally being applied to all?

      Maybe I should go back to 4chan.

      • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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        7 months ago

        OooOo!
        That’s some high number of dwnv0t3s!
        I wouldn’t have realised unless you had replied here.

        Nice, but it’s also good that everyone is at least free to downvote and see the number of downvotes, unlike YouTube.


        All over history, there has been this trend of people misusing technology and then blaming the technology instead of those that misuse it. This trend is detrimental to the technological progress of a civilisation and is one of the driving forces, causing the cycle that our civilisation is stuck in (of losing all tech and history every once a while and then having to start over from the dark ages).
        Technology, gives someone the ability to do something, but it is their will that makes them want to do so. If the “something” is considered “bad” for society, then instead of taking away the ability, we need to insist on getting the person to understand, why and how, said “something” is a problem for the society.

        Until this problem is fixed, we are going to be stuck at the barrier and the next levels of civilisation shall stay a part of Fiction.

  • Kuinox@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The root problem is government not enforcing the law on internet. Deepfakes existed for years.
    The law enforcement should be more proactive on internet.