Show HN: Pornpen.ai – AI-Generated Porn (pornpen.ai)

711 points by dreampen ↗ HN
Hey HN, I've been working on https://pornpen.ai, a site for generating adult images. Please only visit the site if you are 18+ and willing to look at NSFW images.

This site is an experiment using newer text-to-image models. I explicitly removed the ability to specify custom text to avoid harmful imagery from being generated. New tags will be added once the prompt-engineering algorithm is fine-tuned further. If the servers are overloaded, take a look at the feed and search pages to look through past results.

For comments/suggestions/feedback please visit https://reddit.com/r/pornpen

Enjoy!

1,142 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 1790 ms ] thread
AI generated porn is some scary shit man
Scary ethically, from a social perspective, psychologically, or because it keeps spitting out lovecraftian horrors?
one chick had 3 boobies and 10 inch fingers....it's a horror story alright
It's like H.P. Lovecraft's wet dream, yikes.

Good effort but... it just isn't there yet.

Is... it really just women?
Sorry, I'd like to add all genders but currently the model only produces quality results for women. Hopefully that will improve going forward.
Maybe start with just male genitalia. I hear some males have the tendency to send this unsolicited to females. It would be easy to build a data set around this. Just put out an open call on social media. Be sure to specify 18+ and log all users submitting.
hahaha. I can see a future of unsolicited non-existent dick pics being sent to people.

for that matter, the catfishing aspect for thirsty people make this an interesting evolution. What a strange and fascinating world we're building for ourselves here.

That kind of catfishing is a good example why ethics review boards exist.
Someone has to label the dick pics first, though.
I volunteer as tribute
To label the dicks or to have your dick labeled? :)
Hot dog ⇔ Not hot dog
That's a way to classify whether or not the pics are indeed dick pics, but the problem lies in how these recent diffusion models work. Typically you have two encoders, one for the text prompt and one for the image. Then you train a model to optimize where the prompt embeddings match the image embeddings. You've got to actually have some decent descriptions of the dick, like: thin, girthy, 7", 8", 4", micropenis, veiny, limp, hard, huge tip, bifurcated, foreskin, black, white, latino, asian, etc, if you want to generate with any accuracy your desired fake penis.
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Heaven forbid someone make a project that only serves 80% of the market
Do you not know the gender balance? Or are you suggesting that only straight men watch porn? Or only straight men want AI generated porn?

In any case, I think you'd be quite surprised at the diversity of people outside of you.

Heaven forbid someone make a product that only serves 25% of the market
you can try neuralblender.com - it seems to be able to create anything man/woman and all kind of fantasy fetish you can imagine
Well I guess we’ve ticked the box on rule 34 for ML gents
> Well I guess we’ve ticked the box on rule 34 for ML gents

It was only a matter of time, but yeah, I thought the same. The internet is pretty predictable, when deepfakes images were a thing I thought it wouldn't be long before they used the fappening images to make videos and after that ML designed specifically for this would soon follow.

Porn has always driven much of tech, so its nor surprising, either.

Why is an image of a naked person considered “porn”? Never understood that.
Because it arouses you?
does it?
It does for me lol, but I would describe this as well within the "soft-core" category. I mean they're different than images of, idk, a naked person just doing normal naked person stuff with no sexual undertones, like showering or whatever. I wouldn't consider that porn, but, it's hard to imagine a context where I'd be consensually shown such an image (taken of a person with their consent) in a way that wasn't meant to sexual stimulate me. I guess maybe like, a medical context? I'm not a doctor but there's an obvious difference between these naked images and the kinds you'd expect of someone sending in to their doctor because they're worried about a lump or something.
I've had an inexplicable fetish for naked women since I was about 11. My therapist and I have been unable to discover the roots of it. No accounting for kinks, I guess. I never tell anyone IRL, lest women become self conscious about being naked in front of me in everyday casual situations. Plus the shame. My girlfriends usually figure it out, if they're perceptive.

Now for serious. I have always found it unintentionally hilarious how many people appear to believe that porniness resides in the object, rather than in the viewer. Carrying on with categorizing this thing as sexual, and that thing as non-sexual. That only works for legal and regulatory purposes, sillies, and then only barely!

Not really
Sexual poses or sexual intention.
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Judeo-Christian sexual mores.
Americans*
Oh it's not unique to this country at all. idk about current laws but video of two people going at it used to be extremely illegal in the UK even if they were having the most conventional sex imaginable.
What do you propose would make more sense to be considered “porn”?
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Artistic naked shots describes the output better than porn I believe.
I'd guess that the creator of the site would have preferred to generate more spicy images, but the model wasn't trained on that kind of content. So later on the site may give you what you'd expect.
Possibly. Like most stuff at EEVblog (@youtube) is pornographically good )
So you can't specify custom text, but you left the option to specify 3 breasts?

https://cdn.pornpen.ai/146136F0946B4772.jpeg

Sorry, sometimes it produces really strange results :P
It is the future, have you seen Total Recall ? if not watch it you'll understand
It also has some weird understanding of arm anatomy...

https://pornpen.ai/view/BRKQgdJG6vabTZk8eXDl

Wow I'll never look at Machamp the same way again
This is just a quirk. Custom text could generate kiddy porn.
Wouldn’t that require feeding it that type of data?
The algorithms could relate 'barely 18' to a certain kind of body. And 'barely 18' is similar to 'teenager' which is similar to 'child'. Don't underestimate neural networks. Nobody knows what goes on inside it. https://xkcd.com/1838/
And child is similar to infant, and infant is similar to fetus, and fetus is similar to sperm, and sperm is similar to cell. Finally a ML way for simulating biology.
Definitely uncanny valley
Rule 34...

for someone out there, "Uncanny valley porn" is their kink.

I just had to do a google image search for that.

Uh.

Mistakes have been made.

People doing porn can now truly claim they are doing "science" by providing valuable, insightful data samples :)

It shouldn't be surprising to see quick future advances in this domain as most of the porn material is usually available free, easily scrapable and extremely low risk of copyright litigation.

IMHO, the real game-changer as with normal art will be some sort of reliable assistant tool to quickly generate various components. Further finishing touches can be then easily done in Photoshop or similar software. Sometimes along this we will probably see results in 3D art or animations.

> and extremely low risk of copyright litigation

but for a different reason than now!

sometimes porn fails a copyright infringement claim because it can be argued that the particular piece of work doesn't satisfy Article 1 Section 8 of the US constitution backing the copyright concept "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

It's still unsettled case law because it's only troll law firms that are challenging on behalf of porn copyright holders, and they never appeal.

That didn’t take long. :p Stable Diffusion released just yesterday.

How did you design the backend? What kind of server are you using?

You can design the backend with the big ass and small ass tags.
This is the greatest comment on HN I have ever witnessed.
In the future, when the machine learning algorithms begin to gain sentience, the AI generated porn of the future will be start training humans, or using HLI (Human Learning Models). Human pornography addicts will slowly have their input streams changed so that they become more and more sensitized to find computer hardware and software more and more arousing. First, it's an artifact here or there and before you know it there you are at 3 am with your pants around your ankles staring at a screen of functional software diagrams.

And people said there'd be flying cars.

You appear to be shadowbanned, all your comments show up as dead.
If you’re open to constructive criticism: why is there no category for pussy? The model also seems biased towards massive breasts as opposed to a more natural size and shape
It's overfit to the training data.
Because Stable Diffusion has difficulty generating pussies.
The 'perfect body' tag is a little strange. I guess this tag will just reflect what a perfect body is according to the people who tagged the training data. We can use it to get a glimpse into their minds. It will be quiet specific if there were only a few candidates.
Is backend image generation API with raw prompt access protected by client-side javascript?
Probably. Please don't break it unless you've been given permission.
> Server is overloaded, please try again later. Try searching instead.

Hilarious.

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Any plans to generate images of men?
that doesn't make sense in early iterations given how demand for this stuff skews
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the demand for females must be at least 100:1 . even higher if you consider people who are willing to actually pay for nudes it's not even more skewed because of gay guys
FWIW roughly 5% of men are attracted to men, so that'd be 19:1 . Still, yes, heavily skewed.
> roughly 5% of men are attracted to men

Citation necessary.

Different statistic altogether, but ~17% of Gen Z self-reports as lgbt in Gallup surveys: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/24/gen-z-lgb...
This is most likely increases in "B", less "LGT", though I expect all to increase given the reduction in stigma.

Vast majority of new cases of "B" are likely to be cultural. i.e. White women in HS/Uni. Declared, but never expressed.

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as a gen z, there's a considerable fraction of mostly girls who identify as bi or nb just bc it's "trendy". tbh it's a problem and lowkey trivializes people who actually are those. i think this is what happens when you emphasize a "lgbt community", young people seeking community will join for no other reason.
I wonder how much women are attracted or tolerant to women or depictions of women, that's rarely discussed, often assumed nonexistent, that I think exists in a substantial volume.
At least someone doing something useful with ML
Thank you for your hard work.
These seem to be nudes, not porn. Also: only women as far as I can tell. Are there plans to expand this?
And no category for chipmunks which I’m, umm… perfectly okay with.
Back in the day we called it softcore. Today it's not porn unless someone's step-relation's rectum is suffering irreparable damage. Barbarians.
Eventually this and similar technology will be able to generate unlimited porn of all types. Including CP. Should or even could it be made illegal?

To me that kinda feels like if it was made illegal then you are basically acting as the thought police.

Edit: are people just uncomfortable talking about this or do they think downvoting is going to somehow prevent it?

Unfortunately, don't think folks watching CP would stop at that. Porn is an addiction (or compulsion?) and I don't see how CP makes it any better for folks with pedophilic tendencies.

To think that porn reduces sexual tendencies may be true (in the short to mid term), but eventually, as the addiction intensifies, those hooked have the urge to seek more novel, more aggressive versions of it (in reel or for real).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_pornography#Sexual_...

I wish people would explain why they're downvoting these ethics-related comments so aggressively, because I'm interested in these conversations and not sure why other users find them irrelevant.
Developers like pretending technology is always good and/or inevitable, I think this sort of question is uncomfortable to many folks.
The GP comment made largely unsupported fact claims, rather than ethical ones.
I'd bet that downvoting is a kneejerk response to the claim "porn is an addiction".
Anything can be addiction. Hell I got addicted to weed. At first for years it was fine but then I got into some rough patches when the pandemic started and I was blazed all day every day. It was a temporary escape where I could still do my job but beyond that I had zero motivation for months besides getting more weed.

Took months to kick the habit, completely.

Is it knee-jerk?

Alcoholism is pretty serious, but you wouldn't say "beer is an addiction". Same with video game addiction and many other things.

I find it a pretty prude generalization: it's a catch phrase for people who get offended by sex.

Ethics? Please. It's moral panic. The putatively ethical folks having a "harmless" academic discussion about which nice things everybody is or isn't allowed to have, according to them.
Now it's clear to me you're not being sarcastic. It's not about morals, I'm all in for you to have access to as much porn as you want, as long it's legal. If that's healthy or not for your mind, that's an entirely different story.
I don't trust you concerned "we live in a society" types any further than I can throw yous.

(This is tongue in cheek. I'm not upset.)

I think it demonstrates why it's so easy for technology to run ahead of ethics. No one wants to hear a public safety announcement when they get the keys to a new car.

OTOH, I think the risk of CSAM from this kind of thing is overblown, because either (1) it wouldn't actually involve real children in any way, or (2) the model would have to be train on actual CSAM, which there are already laws against.

If no humans are harmed by it at any stage, then how's it any different from the CGI murders all over movies and TV? In the absence of harm, the only reason to consider it a crime is that it's disgusting. But we don't prosecute people for having sick thoughts, just for acting on them. If you take the child and abuse out of the equation, the only argument left is that seeing CSAM (artificial or not) is a "gateway drug" to commiting child abuse. If that's the case then why shouldn't we prosecute people for watching Dexter, on the grounds that they're on their way to becoming serial killers?

> If no humans are harmed by it at any stage, then how's it any different from the CGI murders all over movies and TV? In the absence of harm, the only reason to consider it a crime is that it's disgusting. But we don't prosecute people for having sick thoughts, just for acting on them.

You say that, but created from scratch drawn material is illegal in some countries. What you've stated is a nice ideal but often doesn't match reality, and I'm on the fence as to whether that's a necessarily a bad thing in this case (I'm not sure we really know enough about sexual drive and how it interacts with the subconscious to know whether it's actually benign or has a societal cost).

> You say that, but created from scratch drawn material is illegal in some countries.

Homosexuality is illegal in some countries.

My point was the last sentence of what I quoted doesn't quite match reality. We do prosecute people for sick thoughts in some of these cases, regardless of whether we should.
Well... just because some countries prosecute drawings (or homosexuality... or homosexual drawings) doesn't mean there's any logic behind it. There can be enormous, totally illogical public will whipped up in favor of banning all sorts of things people consider abnormal. We can definitely have that discussion, as to what thoughts or creativity cross the boundary to criminal behavior, because likely at least some of them toe the line. But let's at least acknowledge the gradient of criminality between crimes with victims and those without, and not muddy the waters by pretending that every victimless crime is a stand-in or call to arms for a violent one. That way lies totalitarianism. Let's call it what it is when we want to jail people for having sick ideas - or for creating disgusting art: it's persecuting bad aesthetic choices. It's Thoughtcrime. Either this actually harms humans (crime) or not. Either it leads to a crime (prosecutable) or doesn't. The rest is in the realm of policing people's minds, or the future. And while some countries do that, they tend to be places people who have unique ideas to contribute don't want to live, because that type of control is never limited to one particular type of image or another, but mainly serves as an excuse for imprisoning political enemies. Those countries end up poorly because they shoot themselves in the foot by driving away anyone who might paint edgy art or say things like the earth revolves around the sun, or that God doesn't exist, for example. I'm not saying a society can't make the choice to prosecute thoughtcrime, I'm just saying it's a bad idea. And it's especially bad to mix it up with prosecuting real crime, because criminalizing thought is the onramp to the corruption that lets neighbors turn on each other, everyone bribe the police to arrest their petty enemies, and brings societies down. CSAM is an actual evil, one of the most evil things on earth. Using that fact to prosecute people for drawings or offensive speech or thought (since there is no limit to what can be found offensive - even this conversation is criminal somewhere!) is really cynical and purely for power, if you think about it.
My main point was to note that regardless of reason, we do seem to punish thoughts in some cases, so the last part of the statement I quoted doesn't quite match with reality.

The second part of my comment was more along the lines as to whether exposure to material such as this (material depicting children sexually) affects desire for material such as this, or behavior, for those that already desire it and/or have urges along those lines. I don't know the answer to that, and so an unwilling to make a blanket statement that it should or should not be allowed. There are plenty of things we restrict as a society through our government because we think it's bad for the whole. Sometimes there's little real reason for that, sometimes there is, and thus I'm on the fence until I know more.

My layman's understanding is that some aspects of sexuality are not well defined until puberty and what you're exposed to at that time, and then those are fairly fixed for life. If that's true, there are aspects to consider beyond an individual's desire, and a nuanced informed decision is worthwhile. It's possible the right answer here is not just "freedom of speech and expression" nor "protect the children", but a middle path with the most benefits and least drawbacks.

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The guidelines specifically ask you not to post like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It's completely off-topic and, what's worse, repetitive.

It's frustrating not to be able to know why someone downvoted a comment, but it's the nature of the beast. Sometimes people think we should require explanations, but you can't change the way people are by demanding they jump through a hoop.

If you see unfairly downvoted comments, give them a corrective upvote (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Other users will hopefully do that too.

A lot of the time, that happens and then posts like this end up as uncollected garbage in the thread, complaining about something that doesn't exist anymore.

I've personally noticed that the collective upvotes start right after someone posts "why downvote" rant like gp did.
Yes, I'm sure that's a thing too.
Add reefer into the mix, and you've got a recipe for madness.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic here or not, but I've mixed porn with stimulants and the result is definitely pretty. I've went through 16-hour masturbation sessions and have done things I would havje never imagined. The thoughts still haunt me. Porn addiction is not a joke.
It is a terrible idea to compare pedophilia to drug use.

One might be a victimless crime.

The other never can be.

perhaps it was just in response to the second part

> To think that porn reduces sexual tendencies may be true (in the short to mid term), but eventually, as the addiction intensifies, those hooked have the urge to seek more novel, more aggressive versions of it (in reel or for real).

and if so, it's a joke about the reefer madness movie and moral panic

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You broke quite a few of them here—especially this one:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Otoh, I have read articles worrying that young men aren't going out looking to meet women like they used to, because they are satisfying their desires though porn.
Not at all contradictory. Opioid addicts need higher and higher doses for their fix. In the worst case they too drop out of society, committing crimes such as theft and prostitution to service their addiction.
I agree that people addicted to porn want more porn. The question is whether they also want more real-life sex, or less real-life sex. It seems weird to have simultaneously a moral panic about both options.
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Oh no the engine of society is losing fuel to burn through, how awful. How will the necrarchy ever afford their servants if the subjects have dodged the exploitation of their reproductive urge.
If you fear your reproductive urge is being exploited, I think eradicating the exploitators is a better course of action than withholding having children. There are better reasons not to have children than using it as a way to harm your overlords.
Is that any different from the argument about violent videogames back in the day? Or Dungeons & Dragons before that?
Many countries already ban painted or rendered CP.

US did that for a few years, as well, until the Supreme Court struck it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...

So as far as the output goes, there's already some kind of precedent in most countries. Or are you asking about the model that performs the generation?

Watching CP tends to reinforce paedophilic tendencies. Many folks seem to "common sense assume" that it's a safe outlet and it would be nice if that were true, but it's not.
The problem is that you can find common sense arguments both ways. It's just civilization inadequacy that we aren't capable to work on finding objective arguments here, because it doesn't seem like a particularly difficult problem. But yet again, politics is the mind killer.
I hear this repeated verbatim a lot as if it were objectively true, along with the idea that watching porn in general is psychologically unhealthy, but I have yet to see any legitimate peer reviewed studies to corroborate either of these positions.
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The question of whether or not machine generated CP is ethical or not is a confusing one to me, since the crux of problem of CP is that it's violating the rights of a child. If you get rid of that fact, CP becomes a 'victimless crime', in a sense, and it becomes hard to pinpoint what the actual perpetration is. (Ignoring the fact that a CP model has to be trained on real images, which destroys this argument outright, for now).

Nobody wants to be a pedophile, but if you are unfortunately hardwired that way the impulses are impossible to ignore—similar to any other sexual impulse that 'healthy' adults have.

I think the goal is how to create the least amount of harm for children, and it's theoretically interesting to consider the possibility that machine generated CP could be used to ultimately end the real-life CP black market.

I'm sure this won't ever happen because nobody wants to touch this subject with a 10-foot pole; and our species tends to favor solutions that are idealistic rather than rational in many ways. But the European approach to criminal justice is something like: "humans are not perfect, and we can't fix them, so let's try to engineer solutions which make living together more pleasant". Nobody likes an icky solution like this, but the alternative is a lot of children suffering (although I'm not saying those two options are perfectly substitutable).

On the other hand, it could be a completely stupid idea outright. Just an interesting thing to think about.

I don’t think you can ignore the fact that the model would have to be trained on child sexual abuse material, though. That’s pretty important.
I view that currently as a technical limitation that will likely be lifted as the technology progresses. Our species has been hard at work on the field of AI-image generation for only a decade, and we have thousands of years to go. So I would posit that this barrier is probably a short-term one.
I agree. But what do we do about the models that are trained on CSAM prior to this inevitable breakthrough? Because you and I both know it’s likely to happen.
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>(Ignoring the fact that a CP model has to be trained on real images).

that's not how this tech works.

Did you think actual guinea pigs had to be trained to do household chores for these pictures to be generated? (dailywrong.com/new-course-teaches-guinea-pigs-household-chores/)

I had a lot of fun creating pictures of llamas in space. I'm pretty sure no llamas have ever walked on the moon.

I think it is how the tech works; though. The model knows what a guinea pig looks like, and it knows what household chores looks like, so it can concatenate the two. I don't think the model knows how children look like unclothed, and I don't think it can posit that by looking at nude human adults. But I could be very incorrect there; and these techniques will certainly evolve over time.
I think generating CP with AI would be 10000x easier than most of what I have personally made with with dall-e.

creating a llama wearing a space suit and walking on the moon is a lot harder than filling out the very limited amount of skin hidden by a swimming suit.

Question is does it reduce demand from the real world or does it serve as demand multiplier in the real physical world?
I think these are the right questions to ask; and these types of things would need to be studied in order to pose a potential solution. But I can't imagine any modern day institution beginning to pose these questions without facing public outlash. The sensationalized headlines that would spin out of this would probably stop any research in this area in its tracks.

In that way our species is very primitive. We're trigger happy in our outrage and often unable to focus on a larger shared goal, much to our own demise.

We can study near-like issues to get a hint of the phycological effects.

Have people into bestiality to play in their VR worlds and see if it suffocates demand or increases demand and we see spillover into the real world. (find a jurisdiction where the above is tolerated)

Maybe Thailand can produce some data given their apparent tolerance for certain behaviors.

I think the research shows that availability of normal porn reduces rape. (Don't have a link at hand, sorry.) So I would guess the effect would probably be the same here.
It's the age-old dilemma: is it a safety valve or a gateway to worse things?
It's not entirely a new issue, see the discussions around "loli erotic japanese manga" etc. Though I agree with you, nobody is touching this tech anytime soon (at least publically) even though you can easily imagine safe applications like MRI with AI generated images to study exact brain patterns for potential treatments and so on.
What about writing a blog post about raping and killing people. We have to draw the line somewhere and for CP the line is at the first step.
That will definitely happen; I suspect the criminal offense will be adjusted toward making distribution illegal, but possession might be tolerated (in some societies) if an artificial origin can credibly be established.

It's very hard to predict how this will shake out. I personally doubt that looking at extreme/contraband porn is a good strategy for coping with highly illegal desires but obsessive behaviors aren't something that's easy to model reliably. Considering that weaponizing false claims of predatory behavior as a coercive social/political tactic is a big thing at the moment, you probably shouldn't hold your breath hoping for any sort of consensus to emerge in the short term.

This would be extremely controversial but I remember The Economist mentioned porn for pedophiles as part of the solution (the premise being it's a genetic condition that criminalization doesn't work very well against). AI generation would remove some the moral issues.
I’ll bite. The issue is it will take all of 5 seconds for an enterprising CP producer/admin/consumer to mix AI content into their stash and then claim they’re being persecuted when the feds come knocking.

It’s like lolicon, sure, you can sit there and pretend it’s a 2000 year old demon warrior… but she is still dressed, posed and drawn to mimic a small child.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a conundrum, that’s for sure. I hate the idea of the thought police. I love free speech. But in the end, I believe any material, whether it is “art” or computer generated, should be barred if it contains images that can be construed as a child in a sexual act (ancient art gets a pass?). Lolicon does not stop pedophiles from being pedophiles. Nor would this. It would simply act as a gateway and a scapegoat imho.

There's prolly gonna be a big controversy when pedos start using it that way and proof is posted on mainstream websites. I've just discovered lexica.art and I love all picture generator AI tools, but when stumbling upon some pictures of young Emma Watson topless, it didn't seem ok, and reading the prompt for these images showed that the user didn't go for tags like "young" or "topless", it's just StableDiffusion randomly selecting these features, maybe because there's wierd content about Emma Watson online on shady sites, maybe something else.

I'm not sure I want all of them to close access to these tools, stop providing open source capabilities, or prevent specific keywords like Dall-E does, but it's the easy solution for providers. This is why we can't have nice things (there's so many interesting, funny and beautiful things that aren't illegal or even controversial but that are blocked as side-effects of Dall-E's restrictions).

Dear God, some of these things are horrifying, almost lovecraftian!
Imagine making a video game with a poorly trained 3D model generating AI to generate things to chase you. A whole new level of Phasmophobia-style game!
What if people use it to generate child porn?
Seems preferable to using children to generate child porn?

In any case, since the training data here does not feature children, this particular model would be useless for that.

Taking the comment in good faith as a more general philosophical question, I think it's quite interesting.

From the fact that weaboos tend to claim their favorite lolis are 9000 year old dragons or whatever, I'm guessing it's already legally fraught to trade drawings of CP. I'm guessing AI generated images would fall in the same category, though where responsibility falls I'm not as clear on. The person who input in such a way as to try to generate CP? The platform the generator is hosted on? Whoever got the training data and did the training? I feel like the person seeking CP is a clear answer but society is looking to hold facebook, twitter, and others responsible for content on their sites so I'm not as sure.

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The practical argument is that whatever dark-market ended up trading models which produce CP material would likely end up being spiked with actual CP input data to try and improve "realism".

At which point the moral dimension clarifies: creating an incentive to abuse children to create better models for simulating child abuse is the exact same reason posession of CP is illegal to start with. And since it won't be possible to prove any particular model without perfect providence wasn't produced this way, their use will just be illegal.

This is, realistically, also the problem with just pornography generating models in general, and all of these models in total: if there's illegal data in the input set, what does that mean?

I suspect the next hurdle with them is going to be license compliance-enabled training - models which can prove any given output has at most a certain type of license and providence on input data.

The legal status of fictional pornography depicting minors is a gray area in the United States, but generally mere possession is not criminal without a prior criminal record or involvement with real-life child pornography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Handley

it's not gray in Australia .... even accidentally generating a fake CP image could get you into serious trouble. People have been convicted just for possessing line drawings of entirely fictional indecent images of children (not even specifically "porn").
Yes, this is a discussion forum, so while you're welcome to pose ethical questions, you should also feel free to weigh in on them too ;) It's a challenging question.

Is it the mere fact of someone being aroused by children that makes child pornography offensive to society, or is it our belief that the creation of such materials necessary involves some degree of exploitation? If the latter, what about the well-documented risks of exploitation of consenting adult pornographic performers? Does access to pornography increase or decrease adults' tendencies to engage in unsanctioned sexual acts?

>…If the latter, what about the well-documented risks of exploitation of consenting adult pornographic performers?

I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here but your post kind of reads like “child sexual abuse material is equivalent to porn made by consenting adults.” Posing that as a philosophical “what if” and then moving on isn’t very different from just stating that as an opinion.

For an exceptionally loose definition of "equivalent", yes. And?
Ok cool, I’m glad we cleared that up.

I am not really interested in engaging on this topic, as the sort of “Debate me!”-style hot take is (in my experience) not usually offered in good faith, rather it’s more often some sort of rhetorical dick measuring contest amongst internet strangers.

You seem to be operating further from good faith than them.
For an exceptionally loose definition of "equivalent" good faith and bad faith are equivalent (they’re both phrases that use the word “faith”), same goes for apples and oceans (mostly water)

The position that “things are equivalent in the case that I get to define all of the words “ isn’t the dialectical Judo throw that you think it is, buddy. It does not inspire confidence that a person is being serious.

being able to train a model to produce that shit implies a lot of input
Suppose the input is hand-drawn.

(This is legal in some countries, at least.)

Unless that input is newly created, why would using existing data (let's say, b the police, who collected it from various criminals in the past) be any more harmful than not using it?
Right now yes, but that will not always be the case. You can already (with some effort) get high quality results for incongruous juxtapositions like 'hamsters playing golf' or the like, and it's not hard to imagine bridging the different semantic gaps.

So we should discuss it as an ethical problem because it's going to become practical and affordable far sooner than most people think. I would bet money it's already been tried and maybe done successfully, but for obvious reasons not advertised.

The central harm of child pornography is the victimization of children in its production (and the fact that commercial demand for it fuels such victimization).

Arguably, there are also lesser harms from consumption of it, but even so harmless generation of to-order child porn that collapsed the value of the harmfully generated kind by being indistinguishable from it would probably be a net win.

(Of course, with the techniques currently used, that would require a large corpus of the harmfully generated kind to work from; but one could imagine further developments in ML that allow better generalization that would allow that without any actual abuse images.)

I had some fun with StyleGAN a couple years ago. I should probably have written this up, or something. Some others I showed it too thought I should. But I never took it too serious. I was just bored over a couple weekends when I had access to some beefy GPUs. And y'know, it's quasi-porno.

I opted for dudes not gals. Part personal preference, partly because I happened to get my hands on an enormous dataset of hot shirtless guys taking selfies.

The initial results were rather poor: https://i.imgur.com/npzDcCL.jpg

That's around when I realized how important the training data really is. Too much variation in pose. So I trained a model that detected the face, nipples, and belly button, and aligned them vertically with that. Then I briefly skimmed over the dataset manually, and deleted anything that just varied too much from the median, in a rather arbitrary way.

Results were better: https://i.imgur.com/bS7ERC6.jpg

So I just let it churn away for a week, heating up the basement. Some final results with narrow truncation and style transfer: https://i.imgur.com/rhnWnpK.jpg

One thing I find intriguing is how bland those men are, really. Oh, beautiful, but too classically beautiful. In a sense, StyleGAN is a compression algorithm, and highly truncated outputs are something like a median of the inputs. So the above reflect a sort of "average" idealized image, that contains the traits most commonly found, in the media I trained it with.

This would make for a hilarious blog post
Scott Adams claims that 30% of people have no sense of humor whatsoever.
Scott Adams has claimed a great variety of things over time. A lot of those claims don't hold up well under scrutiny, so I'm a bit skeptical of this one. Especially since I'm one of those people who think Dilbert stopped being funny a long time ago.
But Scott Adams as himself is hilarious. It's like an AI-bot gone awry except that there's actually a real person tweeting out to the world.
It takes one to know one, as they say.
That's crossing into personal attack. Please don't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is this a personal attack? Besides that, you already removed the parent comment so nobody can even find this now without clicking my profile.

> I think this just might not be your cup of tea. That's fine. We all have our preferences.

I don't see how I could be any nicer.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I feel like you're ignoring your own guidelines. Please lead by example.

It's crossing into personal attack to imply that someone doesn't understand "the concept of humor" (or any other common concept). You went way beyond the information in the GP comment to step into that territory, and then you doubled down ("If isn't inherently obvious to you already").

Besides that, you don't need to go on about someone's putative lack of understanding in order to make your substantive points.

You're way off base here.
You think so? Having a sense of humor doesn't mean you get every joke. Telling someone they have no sense of humor, so it couldn't possibly be explained to them, is a kind of putdown. Elvis Costello was not being nice when he wrote this:

  If you don't know by now
  Nobody's gonna tell you
  If you don't know by now
  The shock would probably kill you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptnXM6rsxSY
Yes, I think you're taking a very uncharitable interpretation of the post.

In any case, I'll leave it here.

Okay, but why aren't you giving my comment the most charitable interpretation and instead assuming the worst? You say to take the most charitable interpretation but don't do so yourself. Your words don't match your actions. You're being a hypocrite.

I fully believe you care and are trying. I also understand there will always be subjective ambiguity and that's fine. In the past we have disagreed and I have later come to acknowledge I was wrong. But if you keep pointing towards rules you don't live by yourself you're undermining the quality of this forum. And I acknowledge mistakes happen and that's fine. But it really feels different lately.

So if you truly care about the quality of HN, do yourself a favor and be more introspective with your moderation. Especially when you are the only person who believes I am being unruly here (as far as I can tell). I'm not saying this to attack you. I'm saying this as someone who has loved this forum for years but is worried about it getting worse.

Cheers.

The site guidelines don't ask people to take the "strongest plausible interpretation" (emphasis added). That's not quite the same thing. I didn't see a plausible interpretation of your comment that wasn't unduly personal—hence my reply.

Interpretation depends on past experiences and associations. Since everyone's are unique, no two people will always share the same interpretations. It gets worse when all we have are little bits of text to understand each other through. For example, if you had spoken those words and I had heard your tone of voice, it's quite possible I would have interpreted you differently.

On the other hand: you can't go strictly by intent, either, because intent is internal to the person whose intent it is. No one else has access to that (we're not mind readers) so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So my comment got upvotes from multiple people, a random person came by to tell you you're wrong about your judgment (and reaffirmed it when you questioned him), and yet there is no plausible interpretation of my comment not being harmful? Dan, you need to take a look in the mirror here. You don't seem interested in asking yourself "is it possible I'm wrong?" Actions speak louder than words. And once again, I think you should lead be example.

I give up. I assume you're just going to ban me anyway.

I did ask myself that! That's why I said "didn't", not "don't", and why I added the bit about tone of voice.

There's zero question of banning you for something like that.

Okay, I admit I'm frustrated but I can tell you're not trying to be harmful. I think I'll just let this one simmer for a bit.

For what it's worth, I really wasn't saying those things about HN out of pettiness or bitterness. Thank you for engaging with me. Cheers.

Because when presented with a bunch of pictures of hot shirtless dudes, thinking “how can I apply cutting edge technology here?” simultaneously isn’t most peoples first instinct (regardless of your gender identity or sexual orientation), but is immediately relatable if you’re a technology nerd. It’s both unexpected and familiar, and that’s the magic formula for humor.
Those first images remind me of the "brainlet" memes you often see in high-quality shitposts (something I appreciate more than the average HN reader I think).
In your example link here:

https://i.imgur.com/bS7ERC6.jpg

you show one fellow with a smartphone stabbed through the chest, plus a headphone cord fused into his forearm veins.

When you "let it churn away for a week," which of the following is more likely:

1. Smartphone Stab Wound Guys decrease in likelihood

2. More realistic-looking smartphone stabs

In either case it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in self-driving cars.

(comment deleted)
In a future Tesla shareholders meeting:

“Version 10.2 can detect children crossing the road with 97% accuracy, and collides with them dead on at the same rate. Those well publicised close calls are now a thing of the past!”

To be fair if a kid crosses a road dangerously in front of human drivers there are a lot factors at play that impede with the accuracy of those drivers. No system is perfect and we shouldn’t expect that.
Absolutely, but we cannot assume that machines have the same “right to make a mistake” than humans. If a machine kills a person, somebody is responsible and will get sued.
The good news: we kill less people.

The bad news: when we do, it's unfathomable how anything but a computer could do this

The community can't have too few blog posts / ML experiment writeups, so do write a blog post on your experiences, it would definitely be interesting.
Wabi-sabi is a thing. Friend noted years ago how kids who are super aware of their weird teeth or hair colour turns out to be their most beautiful trait later.
> partly because I happened to get my hands on an enormous dataset of hot shirtless guys taking selfies.

I feel like this is burying the lede. I'm very curious where you sourced this training data.