Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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> Porn. It's always porn.

I've been surprised at the explosion of porn. Well, not actually. Automatic1111 made that easy and anyone that CivitAI knows all too well what those models are being used for. I mean when you give teenagers the ability to undress their crushes[0] what do you think is going to happen (do laws adequately protect people (kids)? Can they? Will this force a shift towards actually chasing producers, distributors, and diddlers?)?

Porn is clearly an in demand market. But what does surprise me is that there's been a lot of work in depth maps and 3D rendering from 2D images in the past few years so I'm a bit surprised that given how popular VR headsets are (according to today's LTT episode, half as many Meta Quest 2s as PS5s have been sold?!). I mean if VR headsets are actually that prolific it seems like there'd be a good market for even just turning a bunch of videos into VR videos, not to mention porn (I don't have a VR headset, but I hear a lot of porn is watched. No Linus, I'm not going to buy second hand...). I think all it takes is for some group to optimize these models like they have for LLaMA and SD (because as a researcher I can sure tell you, we're not the optimizers. Use our work as ballpark figures (e.g. GANs 10x Diffusion) but there's a lot of performance on the table). You could definitely convert video frames to 3D on prosumer grade hardware (say a 90 minute movie in <8hrs? Aka: while you sleep).

There are a lot of wild things that I think AI is going to change that I'm not sure people are really considering (average people anyways or at least stuff that's not making it into popular conversation). ResNet-50 is still probably the most used model btw. Not sure why, but just about every project I see that's not diffusion of an LLM is using this as a backbone despite research models that are smaller, faster, and better (at least on ImageNet-22k and COCO).

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66877718

SDXL and ControlNet are already optimized, if thats what you mean: https://github.com/chengzeyi/stable-fast

(Note the links to various SD compilers).

But the whole field is moving so fast that people aren't even adopting the compilers and optimized implementations at large.

Not really what I mean. I mean TensorRT is faster than that according to their README. By optimized I'm specifically pointing to Llama cpp because 1) it's in C, 2) using quantized models, 3) there's a hell of a lot of optimizations in there. The thing runs on a raspberry pi! I mean not well but damn. SD is still pushing my 3080Ti for comparison.

But I wasn't thinking diffusion. Models are big and slow. GANs still reign in terms of speed and model sizes. I mean the StyleGAN-T model is 75M params (lightweight) or 1bn (full) (with 123M for text). That paper notes that the 56 images they use in the Fig 2 takes 6 seconds on a 3090 at 512 resolution. I have a 3080Ti and I can tell you that's about how long it takes for me to generate a batch size of 4 with an optimized TensorRT model. That's a big difference, especially considering those are done with interpolations. I mean the GAN vs Diffusion debate is often a little silly as realistically it is more a matter of application. I'll take diffusion in my photoshop but I'll take StyleGAN for my real time video upscaling.

But yes, I do understand how fast the field is moving. You can check my comment history to verify if register isn't sufficient indication.

>do laws adequately protect people (kids)? Can they? Will this force a shift towards actually chasing producers, distributors, and diddlers?

It's extremely complicated. Actual CSAM is very illegal, and for good reason. However, artistic depictions of such are... protected 1st Amendment expression[0]. So there's an argument - and I really hate that I'm even saying this - that AI generated CSAM is not prosecutable, as if the law works on SCP-096 rules or something. Furthermore, that's just a subset of all revenge porn, itself a subset of nonconsensual porn. In the US, there's no specific law banning this behavior unless children are involved. The EU doesn't have one either. A specific law targeted at nonconsensual porn is drastically needed, but people keep failing to draft one that isn't either a generalized censorship device or a damp squib.

You can cobble together other laws to target specific behavior - for example, there was a wave of women in the US copyrighting their nudes so they could file DMCA 512 takedown requests at Facebook. But that's got problems - first off, you have to put your nudes in the Library of Congress, which is an own goal; and it only works for revenge porn that the (adult) victim originally made, not all nonconsensual porn. I imagine EU GDPR might be usable for getting nonconsensual porn removed from online platforms, but I haven't seen this tried yet.

I'm disgusted, but not surprised, that teenage kids are generating CSAM like this. Even before we had diffusion models, we had GANs and deepfakes, which were almost immediately used for generating shittons of nonconsensual porn[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit... and the later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Handley

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCLaeBAkFAY

> AI generated CSAM is not prosecutable

This is true, though "AI CSAM" is an oxymoron. There is no abuse in the creation of such works, and such it is not abuse material, unless of course real children are involved.

The post I was replying to specifically cited a Spanish AI CSAM ring that did, in fact, involve real child victims: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66877718

Damn, that sucks.

I get your argument, but there are definitely laws about cartoon underage characters. Agree or disagree the difference is that today you don't need to be a highly skilled artist to make something that people are going to fap to. (I definitely agree priority should be focused on physical abuse and the people making the content, but this whole subject is touchy).

Do non-consensual porn not qualify as defamation? That and obscenity laws if existed should be able to handle most hyperrealistic porn so that only speeches remain.

Good question. US defamation law is fairly weak[0], but all the usual exceptions that make it weak wouldn't apply. e.g. "truth is an absolute defense against defamation" doesn't apply because AI generated or photoshopped nonconsenual porn is fake. I'm not a lawyer, but I think a defamation case would at least survive a motion to dismiss.

[0] Which, to be clear, is a good thing. Strong defamation law is a generalized censorship primitive.

Could this perhaps fall under something like trademark, like an unauthorized use of self, I'm sure I've heard of some celebrity cases that were for similar.

You're probably thinking of the Right of Publicity laws some US states have.

> I'm disgusted, but not surprised, that teenage kids are generating CSAM like this. Even before we had diffusion models, we had GANs and deepfakes, which were almost immediately used for generating shittons of nonconsensual porn

I think the big difference now is that 1) it's much easier to do now, and 2) the computational requirements and (more importantly) technical skills have dramatically dropped.

We should also be explicitly aware that deep fakes are still new. GANs in 2014 were not creating high definition images. They were doing fuzzy black and white 28x28 faces, poorly, and 32x32 color images that if you squint hard enough you could see a dog (https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661). MNIST was a hard problem at that time and that's 10 years. It took another 4 years to get realistic faces and objects (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10196) (mind you, those images are not random samples), another year to get to high resolution, and another 2 to get to diffusion and another 2 before those exploded. Deep fakes were really only a thing within the last 5 years and certainly not on consumer hardware. I don't think the legal system moves much in 10 years let alone 5 or 2. I think a lot of us have not accurately encoded how quickly this whole space has changed. (image synthesis is my research area btw)

I'm not surprised that these teenagers in a small town did this. But the fact that all those adjectives exist in that order is distinct. Discussions of deep fakes like that Tom Scott video were barely a warning (5 years is not a long time). It quickly went from researchers thinking it can happen in the next decade and starting discussions to real world examples making the news in under their prediction time (I don't think anyone expected how much money and man hours would be dumped into AI).

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