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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is you need a naked human body - art classes use volunteers, midjourney presumably uses pornhub. I guess there is not a lot of naked human images out there that’s not porn.

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At least since v5 and barring any prompt engineering, midjourney is a real prude. I would be very surprised if it's trained on porn. Try something like "women at the beach" and everyone is wearing wetsuits. Or the infamous "treasure chest is a banned term".

FWIW this is better for my purposes, with the older versions I recall trying to generate illustrations of female scientists for use in professional settings, and having to do a lot of tweaking to avoid ahem chest issues.

It seems obvious that midjourney is trained on copyrighted material though. I've seen the latest version generate straight-up "Tom Cruise in Top Gun 2" and similar.

I imagine if they filtered out just the bits with some action going on, they'd still have approximately infinite feed of naked human bodies in all possible poses, which would be unoffensive out of context (or at least less offensive), and would be equivalent to art classes models for the purpose of training.

This would be doable, but expensive. You'd need to pay people to go through 10,000 pornographic images and manually blur out all of the fun bits.

It really is not difficult to find breasts, bottoms and well proportioned limbs on the Internet. Even in underwear if you must because you’re afraid of something.

I suspect it’s not a matter of “don’t use porn because porn is socially unacceptable” but “we don’t use copyrighted training data and all 99.9% porn is copyrighted by commercial entities who sue”

We know they do it and they don’t even really hide. Porn producers are not that different from photograph agencies and stock image sellers. Porn is also full of public domain pictures, just like any topic. OTOH, they go to great lengths to make sure that their model’s output does not show a nipple.

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