Unstable Diffusion is producing AI-generated porn while making around $2500 in a month
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Artificial Intelligence text-to-image generators have definitely been the new FAD. Beginning with OpenAI’s DALL-E, we have seen a series of AI image generators released back to back. Not very long ago, StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion was open sourced which gave the world the power to modify and tweak around with the code of the AI tool. Fast forward a few months or maybe just days, AI-generated porn was what people’s kinky minds came up with!
From trying to generate the “perfect woman” to creating websites that will produce any porn image that you like by using certain filters, we were (or are) standing at the door of something that raises a lot of ethical and safety concerns. Many communities, forums, and groups emerged that discussed and contributed to various styles of porn but a lot of them especially on Reddit were either shut down or banned. Does that solve the problem? No.
Imagine watching a superhero television show on your tv screen. Now, when one villain dies, does the show end? Similarly, to fill in the hole caused by the absence of these communities, new and more interesting communities have emerged.
About Unstable Diffusion
Unstable Diffusion is one of the largest communities/forums that is also as of now generating around $2500 on a monthly basis from the three levels of membership that it offers. Beginning in August 2022, the Unstable Diffusion community now has around 50,000 members and is generating high-quality porn using these AI systems has grown considerably in just the span of two months.
Unstable Diffusion lets its users enter text prompts in order to generate pornographic images. The results were not perfect because the dataset that Stable Diffusion has been trained on consists of a bare minimum of images related to porn or adult content. But there’s no stopping Unstable Diffusion; for fine-tuning Stable Diffusion, its admins hired volunteers to create porn datasets for better results.
Arman Chaudhry, one of the admin team members of the community told TechCrunch, “We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from.”
“We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from.”
This Discord Server is simply providing support to people who are interested in creating NSFW. One of the announcement posts by the server also mentions that it is hoping to provide a more “reasonable community” in order to work with the wider AI community.
Starting from a Reddit community that only shared AI-generated porn and discussed ways they can work around the filters that are present in AI text-to-image generators, the community has now started exploring ways to come up with their own AI porn generators.
What’s so “Unstable” about Unstable Diffusion?
While not talking about the considerable community size and minds that are brainstorming to make AI-generated porn, the community claims to have generated around 4,375,000 images to date. This includes AI-generated porn that can satisfy the kinks and fantasies of everyone on the server. With this, they have a special “men-only” channel, a “non-human” nudes channel, etc.
The community is also fairly active and engaging, and hosts competitions for members to recreate generations using their bot. These recreations are then used to improve their model. While the community and its heads are AI-porn enthusiasts, their optimism is certainly a bit scary.
Speaking of “unstability”, these AI tools are still in the nascent stages of development. Similar to the issues that AI text-to-image generators are facing regarding copyright and image generation that could be potentially harmful to society, adding the word porn to it is only going to create more problems.
According to certain worried AI ethicists, these AI generations can potentially have a negative impact on marginalized groups. It will also place further unrealistic expectations on how a woman appears and her sexual behaviors. Another issue would be that it could violate women’s privacy by using their sexual content creations as data to train the models, in turn putting women working in this industry out of a job.
AI-generated porn will particularly have an adverse impact on women no matter what happens. With most of these AI-generated porn communities and websites producing only female pornography and not to forget, people trying to make the perfect woman, AI-generated porn will only create more harm for women. We have previously witnessed an application that could undress any image fed to the model. No matter which image you put, i.e. of a male or a female, that application would undress it by adding boobs and a vagina.
The Role of Existing AI Text-to-Image Generators
Now, Stable Diffusion like many other AI tools that already exist does not promote the creation of explicit content. But with the open source available, it doesn’t prohibit users either, until the generations are harming someone or in violation of the laws.
With the community certainly growing and content filters not making a lot of difference, one needs to wait and watch until it causes someone harm to find out what the companies that have created these AI tools do. These AI porn communities are not the only issue that these companies are facing, there is also a lot going on related to the dataset that is being used to train these AI models, and who is the owner of AI generations also remains.
With the community certainly growing and content filters not making a lot of difference, one needs to wait and watch until it causes someone harm to find out what the companies that have created these AI tools do.
While DALL-E was leading the pack when these tools were first announced, its slow and cautious release lead to the company losing the battle against its other competitors. But maybe Open AI was actually moving on the right track because this is where everything started.
Now, Unstable Diffusion is trying to be “an ethical community for AI-generated porn”. This means it does not promote child pornography (phew!), excessive gore, and deepfakes. Its users have to adhere to the community’s terms of service and there is also a moderation team to minimize harm.
But again, with the community rapidly growing and AI-generate porn being the newest fantasy of everyone, moderation is only going to get harder from here. A parallel problem arises when people who have created adult content but are unaware of their content pieces being utilized as datasets. If not aware, proper credits and compensation are definitely in line. There are also artists who don’t want to do anything with AI-generated porn.
So many questions, yet such few answers. This is why the AI community collectively needs to take steps that will encourage people not only to embrace new technology but also to understand the mechanics behind it. If you see, on one hand, AI text-to-image generators have amazing potential to help artists across many fields but if these tools are always going to be associated with potential harm and porn, that’s what is going to stay in our minds.
AI Porn
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About
AI Porn or AI-Generated Porn refers to online pornography made with AI art generators like Stable Diffusion, among others. Images of women, girls and female pornstars generated by artificial intelligence started surfacing on Reddit and Twitter, predominantly inspiring discourse and memes in January 2023. Most of the AI porn images were made by the group Unstable Diffusion on Reddit (/r/unstable_diffusion) and Discord in 2022 and 2023. AI porn memes and reactions centered on the possible repercussions of AI porn in the future based on the subjectively otherwordly hotness of the AI porn girls that alluded to high body standards, the concept of AI porn competing with OnlyFans models and the possible repercussions of such adult content on specifically Zoomers and Gen Alpha. Additionally, many reactions centered on deepfake porn, which is somewhat related.
History
Deepfake Porn
Deepfakes are videos in which the subject is face-swapped using machine-learning algorithms. The practice was created by Redditor Deepfakes, who launched a dedicated subreddit to share the videos in November 2017. The subreddit has since been banned, however, the technology remained prevalent going into the early 2020s, inspiring many trends and internet phenomena.
One such trend was DeepNude which was a deepfakes application that allowed users to alter photos of a person to make them appear nude. The app was made in June 2019. It uses a pix2pix open-source algorithm to analyze the input image, identify clothing and remove it, replacing it with a generated image of a naked body. The algorithm was trained on a dataset of over 10,000 nude photos of women.
Unstable Diffusion
Starting in August 2022, a group of Stable Diffusion artists and users started a collective called Unstable Diffusion that was dedicated to realistic and anime-style images of nude characters. Discourse about Unstable Diffusion first surfaced on 4chan. Currently, the earliest known 4chan post to mention “Unstable Diffusion” was posted to /h/ on August 21st, 2022. The post was part of a thread that started with one anon saying, “Third day of the journey to generate waifu porn” (shown below).
On September 7th, 2022, a thread called “Hentai Diffusion General” (tagged /HDG/) was started and featured several links to different resources on how to get started, as well as showcasing several rough-looking attempts at generating hentai using Stable Diffusion (shown below). The post started the Hentai Diffusion culture in AI art. The thread also linked the still-active Discord server for Unstable Diffusion which ultimately became the main hub for AI porn following its early, niche influence on 4chan’s /h/ and /pol/.
On September 26th, 2022, the Unstable Diffusion subreddit, /r/unstable_diffusion, was created. The subreddit became a new hub other than the Discord server in which Stable Diffusion users could share explicit, AI porn. For instance, the most-upvoted post in its four-month history was uploaded by Redditor testsubject444 on November 14th, 2022, gaining over 520 upvotes in two months. The post included ten AI-generated images of nude women taking selfies in lingerie (censored examples shown below).
On November 17th, 2022, Tech Crunch writers Kyle Wiggers and Amanda Silberling published an article about Unstable Diffusion titled, “Meet Unstable Diffusion, the group trying to monetize AI porn generators.” Tech Crunch interviewed multiple people involved with Unstable Diffusion such as Arman Chaudhry, one of the members of the Unstable Diffusion admin team, who told Tech Crunch:
In just two months, our team expanded to over 13 people as well as many consultants and volunteer community moderators. We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from.
Tech Crunch also included a quote from Unstable Diffusion Discord mod AshleyEvelyn in its article that was taken from an announcement post in the server posted by them in August 2022. It read:
Basically, we’re here to provide support for people interested in making NSFW… Because the only community currently working on this is 4chan, we hope to provide a more reasonable community which can actually work with the wider AI community.
Overall, Tech Crunch highlighted Stable Diffusion as:
A place simply for sharing AI-generated porn – and methods to bypass the content filters of various image-generating apps… Unstable Diffusion admins released a Discord bot to start. Powered by the vanilla Stable Diffusion, it let users generate porn by typing text prompts. But the results weren’t perfect: the nude figures the bot generated often had misplaced limbs and distorted genitalia.
On December 9th, 2022, a post was made to /r/StableDiffusion by Redditor OfficialEquilibrium titled, “👋 Unstable Diffusion here, We’re excited to announce our Kickstarter to create a sustainable, community-driven future.” The post received roughly 1,100 upvotes in one month.
Following
By January 31st, 2023, the Unstable Diffusion subreddit had amassed roughly 19,400 members and the Unstable Diffusion Discord server had amassed roughly 154,300 members.
Memes and Reactions
In January 2023, AI porn images from the /r/unstable_diffusion subreddit started generating discourse and memes on Twitter and elsewhere. The increased interest was predominantly started by Twitter user heartereum on January 27th, 2023, with a tweet reading, “Apparently this picture and other are going viral on socials because women are SEETHING and debating whether these girls are AI generated 😂.” The attached image showed four AI-generated women, and over the course of four days, the tweet received roughly 13,400 likes (shown below).
Twitter user heartereum added multiple replies to their tweet on January 27th, emphasizing certain problems and scenarios that AI porn could create such as, “AI generated onlyfans for gullible idiots.” Later on January 27th, 2023, Twitter user heartereum posted another tweet showing four AI porn images with the caption, “It is SO over,” earning roughly 14,600 likes in four days (shown below).
The tweets inspired mass engagement, reactions and memes from other Twitter users going into late January 2023. For instance, on January 28th, 2023, Twitter user eddyiskongz posted zoomed-in screenshots of the AI girls' hands and fingers, highlighting inconsistencies by captioning them, “Who broke their fingers? Prob only give away its AI generated.” The reply received roughly 1,500 likes in three days (shown below, left). On January 30th, 2023, Twitter user no_earthquake tweeted a similar joke, writing, “zoomer raised on ai porn asking their partners to put on the extra fake fingers,” and gained roughly 80,400 likes in one day (shown below, right).
It’s SO Over
It’s SO Over refers to parodies of a tweet by Twitter user @heartereum, who posted pictures of AI-generated softcore pornography with the caption “It’s SO over,” seemingly implying that AI would soon make the pornography industry obsolete. The tweet caused much discussion on the app, but many mocked the implied premise that AI would replace humans in pornography. Parodies of the tweet read “It’s SO Over” and show a comically disfigured character in their picture, a reference to how AI still has trouble generating accurately-proportioned human beings.
Search Interest
External References
Meet the Hot Cousin of Stable Diffusion, ‘Unstable Diffusion’
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Listen to this story
Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, the AI image generator is one of the most widely hailed models in the field. When the team decided to open-source it, communities from the field of AI and beyond were excited to make new innovations with it. But, just like any other open-source system, it did not take long for the internet to build something that generated adult-only content.
Enter scene: ‘Unstable Diffusion’, a server that is dedicated to the production of AI-generated NSFW content. It has been trending in a small art generation community. Started in August 2022, the system generates realistic and anime-style images—mostly consisting of women—and other nude characters.
Click here to try it out.
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There have been several communities and subreddits that have been banned in the past for creating sexual content on the platform, but Unstable Diffusion is among the largest yet—with their Patreon account still running and generating funds up to $2,500 a month to keep the development running.
Arman Chaudhry, member of the admin team of Unstable Diffusion, told TechCrunch, “In just two months, our team expanded to over 13 people as well as many consultants and volunteer community moderators.” Chaudhry is also the founder of ‘Equilibrium AI’ and claims to have generated more than 4,375,000 images till date.
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Only 2.9% of Stable Diffusion’s dataset contains NSFW material. Admins therefore recruit volunteers to create porn datasets in order to fine-tune Stable Diffusion. The company is also planning to seek venture funding in their kickstarter campaign.
Read: The Societal Dangers of DALL-E 2
Though Chaudhry’s words seem optimistic in the light of the expansion of the community, AI art generators have been in one too many controversies since their launch—such as copyright issues and ethical concerns—for allowing them into art competitions. Currently, there is no government policy in place to stop the moderation of content on these image generators, rendering them more or less unfiltered.
While Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion too, have filtered out NSFW content, how do we restrict models such as these from popping up?
Unstable Diffusion Seeks to Cash in on Generative AI by Monetizing AI Porn Generators
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Unstable Diffusion and AI porn generation: AI has popped up everywhere in recent years, becoming a part of almost every industry. That includes generative AI, which is at the intersection of artificial intelligence and creativity. However, it only took a short time for the same text-to-image technology to be used for more controversial creations.
The rise of AI pornography: Stability AI made a name for itself with Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image AI that impressed people so much that it brought in over $100 million in funding. But it did not take long for people all over the internet to start using it to create both realistic and anime-style images featuring nude characters.
The images generated by the technology include deep fakes of celebrities and other known figures created without their consent.
Mixed reception: AI-generated images have been a point of contention since they first appeared, with many artists concerned about what it means for the future. Fortunately, it is not quite good enough to replace people quite yet, but it produces some impressive results if fine-tuned. That is particularly so with pornography, which requires less originality and uniqueness overall.
In particular, Japan’s anime and manga communities are adamant against it.
Many are worried that they are practicing and training for something AI will soon be able to replicate.
Other people love it because it is profitable, especially investors that are rallying behind generative AI technology like the metaverse and crypto before it.
Banned from platforms: The mixed reception extends to platforms as well, with many banning AI-generated images. Pornography is particularly singled out, with Reddit and similar platforms doing their best to push it out of the space. However, new projects and forums have stepped up to take over, including Unstable Diffusion.
One major reason platforms are banning AI-generated images is over legal concerns. Imagery and metadata are concerns, and legal problems associated with deep fakes might also crop up.
Unstable Diffusion monetizes it: Unstable Diffusion has appeared as a front-runner for the AI porn-generating movement, building its business using tailored AI systems to create high-quality images. Moreover, it is making money doing it through Patreon, which was set up to cover server costs and more.
Unstable Diffusion is currently bringing in around $3,600 a month with nearly 300 subscribers. With the way those numbers are growing, it is likely to go higher on both counts.
The team is also growing to match the interest, with the $3,000 Patreon goal stating that the owner would make it his full-time job. There is also a massive community that volunteers as community moderators.
Ethics: AI-generated porn is not new, but Unstable Diffusion creates high-quality images that stand out from many other generators. Just like with non-pornographic art, it has the ability to impact artists creating similar work. It might also affect actors who make their living making pornography. There are also legal issues centered around where the inspiration came from and the presence of deep fakes.
Grand ambitions: Unstable Diffusion came from humble beginnings, looking to create a community for those wanting to make NSFW images while also being able to interact with the wider AI community. It has evolved into more, with the creation of porn datasets to feed the generator. There is even a web app on the way.
But Unstable Diffusion is part of a bigger whole, which is Equilibrium AI, a company founded by Arman Chaudhry, one of the members of the admin team. The goal is to support broader AI-powered content generation, and there is plenty of funding on the horizon to support that.
Reportedly, Equilibrium AI found a spot in an accelerator program that provides a grant, which will be used to grow Unstable Diffusion’s model training infrastructure.
Unstable Diffusion also plans to start a Kickstarter campaign and look for venture funding, which is not impossible considering the interest. However, adult content moderation is tricky, and there might be fewer investors willing to give it a shot.