being a woman is fucking exhausting. everything is created to disgrace our lives. this is horrifying.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/20/deep-fake-nudes/
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.
Far more advanced than the now-defunct “DeepNude” app that went viral in 2019, this new site has amassed more than 38 million hits since the start of this year, and has become an open secret in misogynist corners of the web. (HuffPost is not naming the site in order to avoid directing further traffic to it.) It went offline briefly Monday after HuffPost reached out to its original web host provider, IP Volume Inc., which quickly terminated its hosting services. But the site was back up less than a day later with a new host — as is often the case with abusive websites.
"Hany Farid, a computer scientist at UC-Berkeley who specializes in digital-image forensics and was not involved in the original pix2pix research, said the fake-nude system also highlights how the male homogeneity of AI research has often left women to deal with its darker side.
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.
“Would a lab not dominated by men have been so cavalier and so careless about the risks?” he added. “Would [AI researchers] be so cavalier if that bad [stuff] was happening to them, as opposed to some woman down the street?”"
erectile-disgruntlement
