After the bankruptcy of Vice Media, some reporters from the excellent tech magazine Motherboard there started a new, independent outlet called 404 Media.
Her first big coup: A deep dive into the world of AI porn generators and the prospect of a world that has already become a reality today, in which I can create porn images in every imaginable practice with every person I want with just a little know-how collect a few pictures — all without consent, of course.
Up until the 2010s, female celebrities in particular had to live with the fact of Photoshop porn. Internet users in dubious forums used XXX templates and Photoshop to create more or less realistic images of Celibrities caught in the act. Today it does not require Photoshop skills, today it is enough to download specialized AI models, such as a model fine-tuned for porn and one fine-tuned for pictures of a movie star. I can merge both of them into a new AI model with just a few clicks and generate thousands and thousands of new porn pictures with my favorite actress with my stable diffusion installation.
Likewise, it’s possible to generate a custom stable diffusion model with images of each woman that I can grab a few pics of from social media accounts. I then only have to combine this with a porn AI model and I can create thousands of XXX pictures of anyone.
While such nonconsensual celebrity and amateur porn images are banned on the major platforms, the practice thrives on Discord servers and dedicated forums such as AnonIB, where thousands of nonconsensual AI porn images are shared and posted.
In my newsletter, during my last foray into the world of non-consensual AI pornography, I had already adapted the well-known Rule 34 of the Internet (“If it exists, there’s porn of it”) for the AI age: “If you have selfies on the web, there’s porn of it — but only if you’re a woman”.
But this Rule 34 1st Amendment is only apparently funny: pornography by anyone for anyone is a psychological weapon that is already being used against politicians and activists today. Women online, especially those with opinions and attitudes, are sexual cannon fodder for psychological abusers with AI porn generators, and there are a whole bunch of parasitic site owners monetizing these dynamics.
This is one of the reasons why I recently signed this Change.org petition and link to this report, which sheds light on these new psychologically violent processes in the so-called Internet underground.