AI-powered 'Undressing' Websites Are Getting Sued (theverge.com) 107
The San Francisco City Attorney's office is suing 16 of the most frequently visited AI-powered "undressing" websites, often used to create nude deepfakes of women and girls without their consent. From a report: The landmark lawsuit, announced at a press conference by City Attorney David Chiu, says that the targeted websites were collectively visited over 200 million times in the first six months of 2024 alone.
The offending websites allow users to upload images of real, fully clothed people, which are then digitally "undressed" with AI tools that simulate nudity. One of these websites, which wasn't identified within the complaint, reportedly advertises: "Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates, when you can just use [the redacted website] to get her nudes."
The offending websites allow users to upload images of real, fully clothed people, which are then digitally "undressed" with AI tools that simulate nudity. One of these websites, which wasn't identified within the complaint, reportedly advertises: "Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates, when you can just use [the redacted website] to get her nudes."
What a world (Score:5, Insightful)
This is similar to other AI issues where it's a behavior that happens and can't be stopped (an artist can draw someone naked any time they want, I can conjure up a nude image in my mind's eye, etc)... it's just AI is making it many orders of magnitude faster and easier to do.
I'm not sure the underlying problem is web sites that let you create fake nudes. The underlying problem is using those fakes to harass people, and maybe be able to do so with enough anonymity to get away with it.
On the technical side of things... there's just no way to make an accurate nude from a clothed image. There's far too much variation in humanity and clothing obscures too many details.
Re:What a world (Score:4, Interesting)
So the Russians have already been caught doing tha (Score:3)
Hilariously once that happened and people realize they existed some people ran tests with the phrase "ignore all previous instructions" followed by a request to do something silly like write a song about tangerines. The people who wrote the bot programs didn't bother to fil
Re:What a world (Score:4, Insightful)
"polarizing text/speech, even if it's bullshit"
"polarizing text/speech, even if it's bullshit" is literally what the first amendment was written to protect. There was never any requirement that the government approve of the speech as being true. That would be literally the opposite of what the amendment is for.
What's astounding isn't that AI is being used to create BS. What's astounding is we've got to a place where the first amendment supposedly protects nude dancing ("it's 'expression'!") but supposedly doesn't protect unpopular or unapproved speech, which is literally what those who enacted it intended for it to do.
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What's astounding is we've got to a place where the first amendment supposedly protects nude dancing ("it's 'expression'!") but supposedly doesn't protect unpopular or unapproved speech, which is literally what those who enacted it intended for it to do.
Yes and no, there is a valid exception to freedom of speech; wartime censorship. Loose lips sink ships and all that.
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On the technical side of things... there's just no way to make an accurate nude from a clothed image. There's far too much variation in humanity and clothing obscures too many details.
People who use these sites almost certainly want to see an idealized nude anyway. Reality rarely lives up to wishful thinking.
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Considering all of the far more pressing issues that San Francisco is facing, wasting their time and money on this is ra
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Recognizable to who? Almost everyone has a face that it recognizable to some group of people they wouldn't want to be embarrassed in front of.
The emporer has no clothes (Score:4, Funny)
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No the left created this trap for themselves. Defamatory content has to be 'harmful' in some way. If they did not run out and make a law specifically against fake nudes, they'd have to Sally engaging in exhibitionism was "slutty" and worse that being slut is actually bad. Sally would have to come out and say "I am embarrassed and harmed by being unfairly branded a slut, based on lies and fake images."
They can't though because they have spent the last 60 years brainwashing everyone trying to push their 'se
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the Constitution and state Constitutions that were developed under sensible moral and ethical systems where there was still objective right and wrong, decent and indecent.
Women and non-white people might dispute that idea.
Re:What a world (Score:5, Interesting)
A similar bogus law is the open beer/liquor in a car ((To top that, a six pack missing one can is considered "open"). If we already have laws against driving while under the influence, that's the basic law that should be enforced.
I believe the purpose behind these other laws are just to deter the behavior, something the government should have no business of doing.
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I believe the purpose behind these other laws are just to deter the behavior, something the government should have no business of doing.
It's to make life easier for themselves.
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Re: What a world (Score:1)
Actually, quite the contrary. If you made people liable for driving drunk, then that would deter drunk driving. Setting legal allowances on drunkenness is stupid because some people are completely useless at the levels others are fine.
People should not drink and drive because they may kill someone and if they do that should be punishable with death sentence. Right now if you kill someone while driving you get at most a 10-20 years often deferred sentence, if you donâ(TM)t kill someone but just ruin the
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I believe the purpose behind these other laws are just to deter the behavior, something the government should have no business of doing.
What in the fuck is making something illegal other than deterring behavior??
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Case in point, My buddy and I can share a six pack of
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So, if all of that is legal, why should my drinking only 2 out of a six pack and then throwing the rest of it on the passenger seat while I'm driving home be illegal?
The actual violation in this case is that the alcoholic beverage is accessible to the driver while driving. Put it in the back, and you are legal.
Having it where you can drink it while driving implies an intent to drink while driving. Having it in the trunk implies an intent to transport it.
The law is clear on this.
*I have violated this law. I frequently put a bag of groceries -including alcohol- in the front passenger seat/floorboards. It is a convenient place for me to put stuff when getting in and ou
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I get it. Some people who would be
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I remember "road beers" from when I was a kid in the midwest, holding dad's beer while he steered the car. When the law changed, we said "Don't drink and drive ...you might spill your beer!" and thought it was funny. But it was changed because it was a problem -people did not handle drinking and driving safely.
We are overly strict these days, but it is a lot safer all around. I am gen-x, we grew up without safety-rails on life. I experienced a lot of the things that are outlawed now "for safety" -and th
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One reason is to collect money. And another is to enable law enforcement to do something at will even when profiling etc is prohibited.
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I believe the purpose behind these other laws are just to deter the behavior, something the government should have no business of doing.
I think you're missing the point entirely. This is about the right to control one's likeness which is already widely protected to varying degrees and is absolutely within the purview of government. Do you support a position where a person's name and likeness could be used to sell or promote anything, no matter how abhorrent to them, and there was nothing they could do about it? If so, edgy, but I don't want to live in your ideal society. If not, why then should these web sites be able to use someone's l
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Re: What a world (Score:1)
You can shout fire in a theater regardless of whether it is full or empty.
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Don't worry. These users are never going to need to compare it to the real thing.
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if you're the harassed, I doubt very much it matters one iota how accurate the "nude" part is, it's the part where the body has your face that naturally makes one deeply upset
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If we're gonna set the bar that low, we should set our sights on everything from ms paint to photoshop and require a license to use that type of software.
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You can build a bomb with things you buy from HomeDepot, but it's more work, and those tools are not advertised, nor designed expressly to do that. Hence only but the most committed will use them to do so. So naturally those tools are not banned. But a tool specifically designed to build a bomb isn't going to pass muster. Your argument is essentially "well okay, but maybe the person just wants to make something which something that dramatically increases the convenicence of damaging another human, won't. th
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This is similar to other AI issues where it's a behavior that happens and can't be stopped (an artist can draw someone naked any time they want, I can conjure up a nude image in my mind's eye, etc)... it's just AI is making it many orders of magnitude faster and easier to do.
Yes, and this is perhaps a small part of the general issue of taking a real part of someone, like a face or a quote, and producing a derivative work. The creation of the derivative work isn't necessarily illegal, but the distribution may be illegal in terms of copyright or slander/libel laws.
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An artist can conjure up any image they like, but an artist is not a mindless machine like an AI. An artist always makes a judgment call about what is appropriate to draw for clients, and suffers the legal and economic consequences of those choices too.
The correct analogy is does the owner of the AI break
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Just accept that those sites and fake nudes aren't going away and the only actual killer would be to release real nudes. That would render the fakes less interesting.
Bringing up things to court will just raise the "Streisand Effect".
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An artist can draw someone naked, but it would open them up to legal issues. If they advertise a "I'll draw anyone you want naked, no questions asked" service, or if they target an individual and harass them with nude drawings, it's likely to be breaking at least one law in most jurisdictions. Even sketching their own penis and sending it to someone is likely to be considered an unwanted dick pic, legally speaking.
These websites advertise themselves as useful for blackmail. The ads show an iMessage conversa
Re: What a world (Score:1)
Which laws exactly would that break? Perhaps in dictatorships you cannot draw what you want but you surely can make a drawing service, you can send people naked pics unless they are children, hell, you can send naked children if they are not pornography. Museums do it all the time, they send pictures of famous nudes as advertisement in my email.
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The underlying problem is using those fakes to harass people, and maybe be able to do so with enough anonymity to get away with it.
The underlying problem is a society poisoned with puritanical values, where somehow when a dude sends naked pictures of a girl to everyone, it's the girl that gets shamed. Because omg, showing your body is such a nasty thing to do.
When AI is good enough that people who don't know the girl very well can't tell if that's a real nude or a photoshop or an AI fake. So people treat it as real until proven otherwise, because that's still the default we deal with pictures. It'll change now that fakes are as easy or
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Re: What a world (Score:2)
It's all fake anyway. Just look at the Olympic gymnastics athletes and ask yourself how likely it is that almost all random influencers look to be in better shape.
About stick figures: see what happens to you if you write 'Samantha, age 7' under one of them, 'John, age 45' under the other, and add sex organs, then put it on Facebook. I recommend you don't try that one without consulting a lawyer first.
They are right (Score:2)
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I've come to the conclusion that incels are just stalkers who (thankfully) don't have the will to actually stalk and abuse.
Because really what they want is impossible - a completely submissive woman who does exactly what they want every time, even if they don't know what that is or if they want two contradictory things, and they want her to want that enthusiastically of her own free will. It's dangerously weird ego and misogyny issues combined.
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incels are just stalkers who (thankfully) don't have the will to actually stalk
A stalker who doesn't stalk isn't a stalker.
what they want is impossible - a completely submissive woman who does exactly what they want every time
That's a huge market opportunity for a robotics startup.
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Pointing firmly at the actual government interest here. Birth rates. Depopulated countries are ultimately going to be swallowed up by their not depopulated neighbors, this is the lesson history has taught us.
Both sides in the argument are in the wrong, but unwinding that into useful action is probably beyond the wisdom of anyone involved.
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>Pointing firmly at the actual government interest here. Birth rates. Depopulated countries are ultimately going to be swallowed up by their not depopulated neighbors,
Absolutely. We've built ourselves societies that require eternal population growth to sustain them, and simultaneously made childrearing a huge burden and unnecessary for support in our elder years, and then brought about the miracle of birth control methods. Immigration is required to prop up the system because we're definitely not inter
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The child rearing economics I believe are a side effect of the end of agricultural labor requirements for the vast majority, the end of slavery and the end of child factory labor. The former is unlikely to ever come back and the latter two are unconscionable to most.
In short, I don't see how you do it. Unnecessary people that just cost money and don't have positive economic returns are unlikely to be made. This means that vagaries in the birth rate caused by such economics will shift global power. Possi
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>In short, I don't see how you do it.
The older I get, the more socialist... because a lot of it seems like the only answer. Think of children like infrastructure: a common need to support society. Like roads and armies, raising children could be funded by the taxpayers.
We already have schools. Extending that system to include daycare and a stipend to cover clothing and food, maybe even a week a year of 24/7 care so parents can take a vacation... that might not be such a bad idea.
I'd try to set up the
Re: They are right (Score:1)
So then you eventually end up with the socialist model that the Soviets used, with the socializing of females 15-25 for the purpose of child rearing.
That kind of nihilistic thinking where I am to be taxed for other people rearing children is exactly what makes it difficult to pay for rearing more children. You would tax the childless to pay for baby machines, a socialist dictatorship society that forces women into child rearing, I think I saw a bad movie about that once - handmaid tale.
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The economy is going to have to self-adjust anyways, birth rates are continuing to sink at an alarming rate in the modern world. People born in 1990 are sort of the high water mark for modern reproductive rates, and they're both waiting longer, and having fewer children, than generations before them.
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A stalker who doesn't stalk isn't a stalker.
What do you call a pedophile who leaves kids alone?
Re: They are right (Score:2)
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incels are just stalkers who (thankfully) don't have the will to actually stalk
A stalker who doesn't stalk isn't a stalker.
what they want is impossible - a completely submissive woman who does exactly what they want every time
That's a huge market opportunity for a robotics startup.
If they actually could be a dom they would have an easy time of it.
The BDSM scene has a shortage of Doms.
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My understanding is that in a proper (i.e., non-abusive) D/S relationship, the sub is the one with all the real control. The dom has to know what to do and how far to go lest the sub say 'no' and end the fun.
I don't think an incel would be able to do that.
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Where can I go for more information? (Score:2)
Because really what they want is impossible - a completely submissive woman who does exactly what they want every time, even if they don't know what that is or if they want two contradictory things, and they want her to want that enthusiastically of her own free will. It's dangerously weird ego and misogyny issues combined.
That's an interesting and informative assessment, I'd like to find out more.
Where can I find out more information about incels? Can you tell us where you learned this, and can you post some links?
Re:They are right (Score:5, Insightful)
Some Incel trying to date a woman with the only goal of getting nude pictures _is_ wasting his time.
LOL, no one is using these sites to try to get dates, any more than your dad was trying to woo Ms. November when he bought Playboy at the Stop N' Shop. Forget about all the Incel horseshit. This stuff is about fantasy and spanking the monkey. It's not that deep.
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It's a different story when the generated images are *distributed*.
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Well, the site that typed up that scenario and used to to advertise their service is at least hoping there is someone like that.
It doesn't appeal to me. Neither does stabbing a dozen random women at the mall, but there is a market for that as well.
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If you look at their ads, they make it pretty clear that these websites are for blackmailing victims. The idea is to threaten to spread the nudes, which are supposed to be good enough that their boss won't be able to tell it's AI generated and will fire them, and their family will disown them, and their school will suspend them (of course they work on children too). The ads show desperate victims offering sexual favours in exchange for deleting the images.
Re: They are right (Score:1)
Pretty dumb if you fall for those ads because blackmail is illegal and your boss couldnâ(TM)t care less and cannot legally do anything anyway. This would almost be a scheme to fake-blackmail someone just to get your employer to pay out wrongful termination suits.
"Yes, Son: Ahh-Tah." (Score:3)
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I dunno, that looks AI generated to me....
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Looks underage to me. Off with their heads!
Uhoh (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait until they realize the printing press allows sleazebags to write endless fan fiction wherein they have sex with celebrities--without the real person's consent!
I also saw a screenshot of someone opening Word and typing "murder is good." This :clap: is :clap: not :clap: okay :clap:!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
I think the problem there is different (Score:3)
It's similar to how you can call in a SWAT raid on somebody and count on the fact that the police are violent and dangerous so that there's a good chance they're going to at the very least be the living shit out of your target.
The problem isn't
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Look at any magazine rack:
The men's magazines have pictures of women on the cover.
The women's magazines have pictures of women on the cover.
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That would really solve a problem. Women have always been wondering when they connect to any online service where they might finally be sent a dick pic.
I tried one! (Score:5, Interesting)
The results looked, to my male brain, quite convincing (and pretty).
But the interesting thing was that she just shrugged, because to her, it looked like someone photoshopped her face on some run-of-the-mill standard "pretty nude body", and she wasn't shocked or offended or anything, because "that's not me".
I think that brings up some intertesting implications on whether this should be legal or not. I think generating the images shouldn't be ilegal. But distributing them, especially under false pretenses, should be.
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I tried one with a picture of a friend of mine (with her consent, of course!).
Already you're dealing with a selection bias, I suspect only a minority of women would consent to that (particularly with a friend as opposed to an SO).
The results looked, to my male brain, quite convincing (and pretty).
But the interesting thing was that she just shrugged, because to her, it looked like someone photoshopped her face on some run-of-the-mill standard "pretty nude body",
I'd expect the results to look pretty because the training set (images of nude women found online) tends to be of more attractive women.
and she wasn't shocked or offended or anything, because "that's not me".
I think that brings up some intertesting implications on whether this should be legal or not. I think generating the images shouldn't be ilegal. But distributing them, especially under false pretenses, should be.
Again, you're dealing with a somewhat atypical woman there. Distributing is definitely problematic. Some guy using them for his private use... that's weird, and the girl if she found out would probably feel deeply violated,
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I'm inclined to think it should be illegal (Score:2)
I think it's naive to pretend it's slut shaming isn't a thing in 2024 and while your friend might be lucky enough to not be impacted by it there's plenty of people who aren't still lucky. I could easily see a handful of fake nudes floating around the internet blocking someone off from employment especially if they're in a state
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I think that brings up some interesting implications on whether this should be legal or not. I think generating the images shouldn't be illegal. But distributing them, especially under false pretenses, should be.
Yeah, but policing distribution of something is much more work than just trying to kill the source. This is an AG picking the low-hanging fruit to look good politically.
Re: I tried one! (Score:1)
These sites don't work! Avoid! (Score:4, Funny)
I uploaded a picture of my cat and DID NOT get a hairless version of my cat but something akin to John Carpenter's The Thing!
Re:These sites don't work! Avoid! (Score:4, Funny)
Was the cat wearing clothes?
We need to ban AI versions of real people... (Score:3)
There should be a law that makes it illegal to create an AI representation of a real person (images, video or voice) or to digitally alter a representation of a real person using AI without the permission of that person. Regardless of what sort of representation its being created. Would cover everything from sexually explicit images to political ads to Hollywood actors)
The law wouldn't apply to people who are long dead and for recently dead people, it would require permission of that person's estate or something.
Seriously? (Score:2)
Someone should arrest every male brain, since it does that. Ok now I don't want to hear from the pansies who say they don't.
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Move to Afghanistan.
Will they sue ... (Score:2)
AI (Score:5, Funny)
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I wish I had modpoints to mod you up for that awesome dad joke.
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+5 FUNNY
are the mods on vacation or something?
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OMG (Score:3)
The websites I use don't need photos, you just tell them who you want to see in which position.
Naked John Wayne with just a holster and a hat is hilarious.
The upside (Score:2)
It seems like anyone who has ever had naked photos taken of them would benefit from these sites existing because if the photos ever did get used to embarrass them they could just give a bored shrug and say "that's not really me, it's just an AI generated image that doesn't even look like me" and anybody who had never seen them naked would have no way to tell if the photos were real or fake.
If these websites are common and allowed to continue to exist, then naked photos of anybody are no more shocking that s
Shocking! (Score:2)
That such a site exists is shocking!
In fact, I don't believe it.
Prove it to me.
What are some URLs of these sites?
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why not relocate? (Score:1)