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Notes -
More notes from the AI underground, this time from imagegen country. The Eye of Sauron continues to focus its withering gaze on hapless AI coomers with growing clarity, as another year begins with another crackdown on Azure abuse by Microsoft - a more direct one this time:
Microsoft sues service for creating illicit content with its AI platform
More articles here and here.
Translated from corpospeak: at some point last year, the infamous hackers known as 4chan cobbled together de3u, a A1111-like interface for DALL-E that is hosted remotely (semi-publicly) and hooked up to a reverse proxy with unfiltered Azure API keys which were stolen, scraped or otherwise obtained by the host. I probably don't need to explain what this "service" was mostly used for - I never used de3u myself, I'm more of an SD guy and assorted dalleslop has grown nauseating to see, but I'm familiar enough with general thread lore.
As before, Microsoft has finally took notice, and this time actually filed a complaint against 10 anonymous John Does responsible for the abuse of their precious Azure keys. Most publicly available case materials compiled by some industrious anon here. If you don't want to download shady zips from Cantonese finger painting forums, complaint itself here, supplemental brief with screencaps (lmao) here.
To my best knowledge,
notFiz, the person actually hosting the proxy/service in question.At first blush, suing a bunch of anonymous John Does seems like a remarkably fruitless endeavor, although IANAL and have definitely never participated in any illegal activities before
officer I swear. Aschizotheory among anons is that NSFW DALLE gens included prompts of RL celebrities (recent gens are displayed on the proxy page so I assume they've seen some shit - I never checked myself so idk), which put most of the pressure on Microsoft once shitposted around; IIRC de3u keeps metadata of the gens, and I assume they would much rather avoid having the "Generated by Microsoft® Azure Dall-E 3" seal of approval on a pic of Taylor Swift sucking dick or whatever. Curious to hear the takes of more lawyerly-inclined mottizens on how likely all this is to bear any fruit whatsoever.Regardless, the chilling effect already seems properly achieved; far as I can tell, every single person related to the "abuses", as well as some of the more paranoid adjacent ones, have vanished from the thread and related communities, and all related materials (liberally spoonfed before, some of them posted right in the OPs of /g/ threads) have been scrubbed overnight. Even the jannies are in on it - shortly after the news broke, most rentry names containing proxy-related things were added to the spam filter, and directly writing them on /g/ deletes your post and auto-bans you for a month (for what it's worth I condone this, security in obscurity etc).
If gamers are the most oppressed minority, coomers are surely the second most - although DALL-E can burn for all I care, corpo imagegen enjoyers already have it good with NovelAI.
The Fascist-Feminist synthesis that the majority of normies implicitly agree with is that men viewing explicit material is metaphysically damaging in some way, and thus it must be curtailed as much as possible. There's a bunch of laws that obliquely touch on these aspects (often relating the "production of child porn"), as well as a ton of potential PR damage. That's why webhosts, credit card processors, sites like Patreon, etc. have always been weirdly prudish about any explicit material. We should expect the same thing to happen to image generators. It'll probably reach a similar steady-state eventually, with explicit stuff existing on the periphery while facing periodic crackdowns.
Why expect that as opposed to a pornhub model, where there’s a separate image generator for porn? Mind geek gives 0 fucks, I’m sure.
I'm quite sure no service would be willing to be declared the world's first public-use CP generator, which it will become 100% within 4 seconds of its release to the plebs (whether it would be actually deserved is entirely irrelevant). The possibility of genning anything that looks even remotely teenage remains a hard technical problem, as of yet unsolved; while open-source's answer can be "yes, and", I think this will not fly for anything corpo-adjacent. This was discussed earlier wrt textgen, and the same is doubly, triply, orders of magnitude more true of imagegen; doing it properly requires painstakingly curating the dataset of your model, and even then I imagine there will be no shortage of borderline cases from crafty
coomersproompters to incense the normies.I think that's easily solvable using image recognition on outputs.. After all training a neural network to recognize too-young-looking people shouldn't be a big deal.
You, uh, have his meaning backwards. Open source is what did the solving.
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