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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

I am not a fan of software such as this putting in an arbitrarily "safety" feature which can only be disabled via undocumented environment variable. At least make it a flag documented for people who don't have an issue with nudity. There isn't even an indication that there is a "safety" issue, you just get a blank image and are wondering if your GPU/model or install is corrupted.

This isn't running on a website that is open to everyone or can be easily run by a novice.

Anyone capable of installing and running this is also able to read code and remove such a feature. There is no reason to hide this nor to not document it.

Also the amount of nudity you get is also highly dependent on which model you use.

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Nudity isnt really the core issue. It is about illegal content. Nudity is the over-protective, over-inclusive bandaid solution to prevent this thing from being used to generate the very illegal material that will trigger authorities.

Then instead of just presenting me with a blank image tell me why it's blank. Or add the word "nude" to the default negative filter which by default doesn't have that in it.

The default is:

   negative-prompt:"Ugly, duplication, duplicates, mutilation, deformed, mutilated, mutation, twisted body, disfigured, bad anatomy, out of frame, extra fingers, mutated hands, poorly drawn hands, extra limbs, malformed limbs, missing arms, extra arms, missing legs, extra legs, mutated hands, extra hands, fused fingers, missing fingers, extra fingers, long neck, small head, closed eyes, rolling eyes, weird eyes, smudged face, blurred face, poorly drawn face, mutation, mutilation, cloned face, strange mouth, grainy, blurred, blurry, writing, calligraphy, signature, text, watermark, bad art,"

Sure, if this was a commercial product i would also scream about feedback. But as this is a free side project im not going to criticize decisions on what they think they need to do to avoid unnecesary drama. I credit them for making the bypass relatively simple.

Nobody is screaming

Then society shouldn't tolerate knifes either.

Banning an entire class of activity because someone somewhere might abuse it is a ridiculous irrational way to reason about things.

The question is simple: Will the thing mostly be used for bad or good? Unless you think the vast majority of humanity are pedophiles then these features should be allowed.

Think of the children was never a valid argument and isn't a valid one today. I truly hope this utterly stupid and brain-dead way of thinking never escapes the AI community and infect other fields.

Agreed. This was an inevitable use case for AI imagery from the get-go. No way around it. Even if one dev/trainer goes out of their way to make certain that it can't be used for that purpose, another model will be trained that can. So the only three solutions are:

A. Get over it.

B. Ban the tool in its entirety.

C. Waste tons of governmental resources, spy on people more, and operate in legal grey-area to hunt down people that produce that kind of stuff with these models.

The correct answer seems obvious to me.

Genuinely curious what type of content would be considered illegal here.

- the tool is drawing original content. - the tool is executing on my laptop. - the output image is not shared with anyone.

In a way, whatever this tool can do, MS Paint could (theoretically) do.

Or am I misunderstanding the whole thing?

There's a great wikipedia page on this very topic [1]. In some countries like Germany fictional porn isn't considered porn, while other countries like Australia or France consider the possession of drawings of naked minors a crime worthy of jail sentences. And then there's the US where having the images on a computer is fine, as long as they aren't sent over the internet and the computer never crosses state lines.

In general it's a topic people are careful about because the legal situation is complex, and in many countries associated with the potential of heavy jail sentences.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...

When you stop and think about it, it is kind of insane that a fictional drawing in private possession, not even communicated to anyone, is already sufficient to land someone in prison in so many jurisdictions. Isn't this a clear case of legislating moral purity (as opposed to actual harm)?

Nope. It is illegal if you do it on ms paint too. Images of naked kids (real or fiction) + transmitted over internet (ie state lines) = bad bad day for all involved.

> + transmitted over internet (ie state lines)

But OP specifically said: "the tool is executing on my laptop. - the output image is not shared with anyone."

The state lines thing is only about federal crimes. Possession is most likely illegal as a state crime on its own. The repercussions of even being suspected of crimes in this area means that every rational person would take precautions far above what is legally necessary to prevent any association with such material.

Maybe use a desktop instead, because crossing state lines with that laptop might carry a jail sentence with a minimum term of 5 years.

I would assume that running an AI image generation software is something you'd do on a desktop anyway.

But it requires transmission over the internet, right? This is actually very interesting. Am I legally allowed to draw naked kids for my own enjoyment in the comfort of my own home?

Simple possession is also a crime, just a state crime. The internet transmission triggers federal jurisdiction and federal charges. There is no safe/legal way to possess such images.

Is any AI generated image even illegal, assuming originality and difference from training set?

The console output tells you what happened.

Can you tell which env variable to set?

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