Fake naked photos of thousands of women shared online | Hacker News Reader

Fake naked photos of thousands of women shared online

bbc.co.uk

13 pointsvinni220 comments

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We may be entering the era of "it wasn't me."

If A accuses B of having nude photos online, B will reply, "That's not true at all: they are fakes." There will likely be enough strategic ambiguity to successfully deny the photos's veracity. No one will have nudes online; everyone will have nudes online.

Maybe this will lead to people not losing their minds over the existence of nude photos.

It's the new "I was hacked"

I am sure the AI models to detect fakes are also improving.

This article falsely claims that "More than 100,000 women have had their clothes digitally removed from images" when in fact the claim is that photos of women's faces have been attached to procedurally generated graphics of naked women's bodies. But describing what is happening truthfully probably wouldn't get as many clicks.

I don't think that's truthful either, given the face isn't attached to anything—it's the clothing in the source image that is altered. The rest of the source image stays the same.

You're right, I had it backwards. The procedurally generated graphic is pasted on to the original image.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that this is not digitally undressing anyone. These are not images of the naked bodies of the clothed women in the original image.

I wish outrage could instead be directed at the use of body scanners at airports which are in fact taking pictures of what's under our clothes.

Photoshopped nudes have been a thing for 20+ years, especially for celebrities. Is this suddenly news because "deepfakes" is the new AI bogeyman?

If there is a cheap and automated way to do it, then it has suddenly become an issue for way more people than pop culture icons. Society, at least here in america, is really really bad at not holding things that are seen as "moral outrages" to some people against you.

I think this is the beginning of the end of the internet as we know it.

Once upon a time, we would assume that we could use the internet as a reliable source of information; that was the great innovation of such a network.

Nowadays it's fake news, SEO content, ads, fake images, fake videos, fake reviews, market manipulation.

In a couple of years you won't be able to trust anything that you don't hear from another "real" person in presence, and we'll pull back on a lot of tech things.

The internet was known for the exact opposite: an extremely unreliable source with zero vetting or gate keeping. People used to trust the Encyclopedia Brittanica and other published sources were mostly reliable even if mistakes did happen. The wild west of the internet was very scary to most people.

These days we no longer trust institutions to vet information in the same way. Although I see the trend starting to reverse with Facebook and others taking on the role of a traditional publisher with respect to vetting.

When?

The usenet was gold in the 90s. Forums were once working fine - before marketing arrived there. Not always professional information, but mostly genuine people discussing their own experience.

There were no real motives to fake, pretend, deceive. Now there are.

Yes, there were lots of well meaning, but ultimately wrong people spreading their opinions. There were very few people spending the effort to vet and otherwise ensure reliability of the information provided, the best you could do was university professor websites. This was in strict contrast to the expectations the public had for published media at the time.

Public expectations with respect to publishers is vastly diminished these days. It may be hard to remember a time when it was broadly trusted. Of course there were groups that "knew" this trust was misplaced, but the tide didn't turn in earnest until the Iraq war.

> The BBC has tested the software and received poor results.

Sounds like The Economist dry humour.

Why not go all the way and create “photos” of fake people with faces that don’t exist IRL? Doesn’t solve the problems this material causes generally, but at least no real individuals will be involved.

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com

What problems does this material cause generally?

I'm guessing they're referring to the part in the article about paedophillic content - even if no real children are being harmed in the process (e.g. generating an image of an entirely new fictional child similar to thispersondoesnotexist.com and then run the output through the nude filter), it's still generating sexualised content depicting minors.

The internet frequently serves as a neural prosthetic. Millions or billions of men (and probably at least millions of women) routinely imagine women naked. Therefore it is inevitable, if not suppressed, for the internet to assist in this common neural task.

That doesn't make it right. Murder and rape are are also common brain intermediated tasks that the internet is used to assist. But it would only be surprising if this wasn't happening.

Serious question: Are you asserting that imagining women naked is wrong in the general case?

I don't think it's wrong to imagine a woman naked. But I think it's wrong to share an imaginary nude image of a living woman with the public, if she hasn't opted in. I don't think it should be illegal though, at least if you aren't trying to pass it as real.

Substitute any sex or gender, same opinion.

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