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The website promises to make “men’s dreams come true.” Users upload a photo of a fully clothed woman of their choice, and in seconds, the site undresses them for free. With that one feature, it has exploded into one of the most popular “deepfake” tools ever created.

AI researchers, he said, have long embraced a naive techno-utopian worldview that is hard to justify anymore, by openly publishing unregulated tools without considering how they could be misused in the real world.

“It’s just another way people have found to weaponize technology against women. Once this stuff gets online, that’s it. Every potential boyfriend or girlfriend, your employer, your family, may end up seeing it,” Farid said. “It’s awful, and women are getting the brunt of it.

Because you're right! I've seen a lot of people defend AI against criticism of stuff like the use of deepfakes because "We've been creating misinformation since the days of film!". They say that yes, misinfo is bad, but it's important to remember that we've been doing the stuff that AI is currently able to do for decades and longer. It's a new tool in the toolbox, as it were, but the base situation isn't changed: You need to fact check, cite sources, and remember that people and governments lie on the internet.

The problem with this argument being something which negates anti-AI criticism is that it doesn't take into account a very important factor:

Ease of use.

Sure, we've been doctoring photos since film and darkrooms were still a thing. We've been photoshopping celebrity faces onto naked bodies since we've had photoshop. Revenge porn exists, and revenge fake porn does too! There's altered photos of women hugging cops that never needed DALL-E's existence to happen. All of this is true.

But before AI as it is now, you had to actually be really good at doctoring images to be able to spread convincing misinformation. Bad and mediocre Photoshop jobs are extremely easy to notice, and many of the common ways you hide bad Photoshop jobs are also known and when they're used, the image is treated with suspicion. Artifacting, artificial blur, and low pixel count/low quality images have been God's gift to cryptids since we first saw Bigfoot walking that way. In recent years we've even gotten to be creative and combine that with 3d animation to create videos of that sort of thing! Neat!

Now all I need to do to create and spread extremely convincing misinformation is type into Stable Diffusion "Vladimir Putin and Bernie Sanders shaking hands". Now all I need to do to make porn of literally any woman to every exist on the Internet is to use the new model talked about in the journal report. I don't need to spend hours working on a single image (nor the months and years to learn to do so well and efficiently). I can generate dozens and dozens in a couple hours, all just by clicking a button or two, writing an alt-text for a image that never existed, or uploading a photo or two.

The problem right now with AI-ethics isn't that people are able to plagiarize and steal from artists nor that people are able to design misinformation via doctored images.

Before, doing something like this meant spending hours finding just the right photos and doing detailed work in photoshop. There was a time commitment and a level of skill required, which meant only the truly obsessed would do it.

Tools like this mean that any 13-year-old boy who just started to have Feelings About Girls can take a picture of his classmate (or pull one from her Instagram) and upload it to the tool and create one of these images - then share it to his friends - in a matter of minutes.

(One more reason for parents to keep a very close eye on their children’s technology use)

This isn’t just about celebrities and influencers. This is going to impact adolescents, including those who have made every effort to be careful about what they post online.

Imagine a middle school girl who takes all the warnings about social media seriously. She has a private Instagram that only her friends can see, and she just posts pictures of herself and her friends doing normal fun teen things.

Then one of her classmates decides he has a crush on her and doesn’t have the adult guidance in his life to process those feelings in an appropriate way. He hears about this tool and decides to “just try it out.” Maybe he starts with a celebrity - what’s the harm, she’s practically naked in this red carpet photo anyway. He’s impressed, and he shares the image and the tool with his friends. One of them which knows about his crush encourages him to try it with a picture of the girl he likes. He does. Again, what’s the harm? What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right?

The tool works, and he now has an image that shouldn’t ever have existed. An image that girl never took, and certainly never posted. An image she and her parents would be horrified to find out about.

And he shares it with his friends. After all, he wants them to think he’s cool. They laugh, they share it with their friends, and suddenly it escapes containment and gets posted, shared, edited, and memed.

The girl will never escape that photo. The boy will realize too late what he’s done, and that he’s ruined any opportunity to build a real relationship with the girl he liked. Other girls will want nothing to do with him. He may face consequences, but the ones that will impact him the most are the social ones.

The worst part? There’s no way to put this genie back in the bottle. Pass all the government regulations you want - if AI exists, this does too.

So what do you do? The girl who thought she could have a private Instagram now knows she can’t post anything online at all, even with privacy measures in place. Her parents may contact the school and put her on the no-photo list. Even a photo of her playing volleyball in the yearbook could be misused.

My hope here is that we are reaching a point where more and more people will see just how dangerous all of this can be, and we’ll see more and more people choose to “unplug.” I especially hope to see more parents choose to keep their kids off the internet and social media longer, and to not allow their kids to have private access to personal devices (ie no phones in the bedroom).

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