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.
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.
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.
Is that different than wanking to clothed photos of the same people?
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.