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General Intelligence
How Academic A.I. Research Morphed Into Computer-Generated Porn
These dangerous technologies are still in their infancy, and they’ll continue to become more accurate and convincing
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
Less than 10 years ago, some of the most basic artificial intelligence algorithms, like image recognition, required the sort of computing power typically found in data centers. Today, those tools are available on your smartphone, and are far more powerful and precise.
Like nuclear power or rocket propulsion, artificial intelligence is considered a “dual-use” technology, which means that its capacity for harm is equal to its potential for good.
Earlier this week Vice reported the latest example of one of these harms: Coders were using images of sexual abuse to train algorithms to make porn. The article details how nonconsensual images were compiled by an anonymous PhD student into a dataset and combined with off-the-shelf algorithms to generate custom videos.
The creator of the A.I.-generated porn, who posted it on platforms like PornHub and OnlyFans, told Vice that he used StyleGAN2, an open-source algorithm built by Nvidia. If you’ve seen highly realistic fake faces online, like ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com, they’ve likely been generated by StyleGAN2.
Like nuclear power or rocket propulsion, artificial intelligence is considered a “dual-use” technology, which means that its capacity for harm is equal to its potential for good.
But this technology didn’t show up overnight. There’s a clear path from some of the earliest modern image-generating algorithms to this phenomenon of A.I.-generated porn. Here’s what it looks like.
The leap to GANs
Image generation algorithms leapt forward in capability in 2014, with the creation of generative adversarial networks, or GANs. The idea, which A.I. researcher Ian Goodfellow…
