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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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And training the AI on the actual person's breasts isn't required for the result to be highly similar to what they actually look like topless, at least for some women, considering at least some people's breasts are visually similar to other people's breasts. Thus a person who has not already consented to having topless photos of themselves present anywhere on the internet can have topless images of them created to what is indeed a very high degree of verisimilitude to their actual naked form, using i.e. pornstar's breasts as training data.

Porn stars not only self-select based on their agility in smoothly changing positions in front of cameras--incidentally, a skill shared with politicians--but also for how good they look naked. If an AI image generator is trained on naked bodies of porn starts, its AI-completed naked version of me will look amazingly better than I actually do.

Women's breasts, in particular, come in a variety of shapes, and they are frequently not symmetric. Older women's breasts tend to be flat--think more like those pictures in the old National Geographic depicting women in some far-away hunter-gatherer tribe. The nipples and areolae come in various shapes and sizes, and change with temperature. Some have inverted nipples. Practically all of this variability is hidden by the kinds of clothes women wear, especially if they are into padded bras.

The distribution of body fat also varies significantly for overweight women, and this is also mostly hidden or distorted by clothes.

Women's breasts, in particular, come in a variety of shapes, and they are frequently not symmetric. Older women's breasts tend to be flat--think more like those pictures in the old National Geographic depicting women in some far-away hunter-gatherer tribe. The nipples and areolae come in various shapes and sizes, and change with temperature. Some have inverted nipples. Practically all of this variability is hidden by the kinds of clothes women wear, especially if they are into padded bras.

I'm aware of this. The point is that not everyone with good-looking (pornstar-like, if you would) breasts, decides to become a pornstar. Thus, these types of people are vulnerable to having very realistic versions of their breasts recreated with pornstar data, despite never themselves putting images of their actual breasts out onto the internet. Additionally, there's plenty of data of non-pornstar-like breasts out there to train data on. The point is not that AI will always generate topless versions of people that are very much like what their breasts actually look like, its that it can with at least some relatively degree of frequency.