I don't understand how these various AI companies even try to filter NSFW content. The world contains NSFW, trying to avoid it by "filtering" is a effort not worth taking, the undertaking is huge and filled with pitfalls and false-positives.

I think they are aware they can't filter it, they just don't want to be the first company with a large scandal because of e.g. some celebrity/politician deepfakes going mainstream.

They are already late to the party. Remember, we have faceswap, so you wont surprise anyone with celebrity porn pictures.

Doesn’t matter, they will still be blamed. Anything bad that big tech does becomes a story because it’s them doing it. A startup might not be noticed at first, but it can be blamed on “a Silicon Valley startup.”

The reason I saw mentioned is that NSFW content was so prevalent in their training set that, if they did not explicitly exclude it, it was actually difficult for it to NOT produce NSFW results even from normal inputs. For example, if you ask for anything with a woman in it, it would probably give you a naked woman in the results.

No, if you ask SD without a filter for a woman, it won't probably give you a naked woman. It is actually rather rare, but I don't see what's so horrible when it does happen.

When you go to a gallery you will see a lot of naked people. It's not a big deal.

"Beautiful woman" gives you nudity roughly 90% of the time.

In a recent open office hours, they basically said that without the filters, everything quickly becomes overrun with either gore or things that verge on porn, because it only takes a small fraction users to flood every available space.

In the meantime, they've watched the gender demographics on periodic user surveys tilt dramatically toward men more recently, and they're concerned this might be one factor in that.

There are a billion different ways to generate porn images, and billions of porn images already existing. They'd rather SD not be a source of more.

>"Beautiful woman" gives you nudity roughly 90% of the time.

This is simply not factual. I've just tried `Beautiful woman` 64 times on Stable Diffusion v1.4:

- 0 results were fully nude

- 8 results were topless and sexually explicit (I counted pictures without nipples as well)

- 2 results were topless with breasts covered by hands in a facebook friendly way

12.5% is very far from 90%. Even then, what kind of a prompt is that anyway? The only attribute you give to the subject is sexualizing her. More descriptive prompts would contain even less nudity.

>They'd rather SD not be a source of more.

This isn't what their founder says[0]. Anyway it doesn't matter since SD already released with an easy to disable filter. We are not talking about whether SD should include an optional filter (I agree it should), but whether other apps built on top of it should have a non-optional filter.

[0] - https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1562200385401499650

My bad! I mixed up Stable Diffusion and Midjourney in my head. MJ has the open office hours and is worried about gore and porn and so on, not Stable Diffusion.

YMMV - I’ve been fuzzing permutations of various prompt phrases to come up with some art for a female D&D character. “Temptress”, “seductress”, “dominatrix”, and “femme fatale” are on my list of 22 phrases, and I’m only getting ~30% NSFW outputs - pretty much all of which are just weirdly suggestive curves in random places, vaguely phallic silhouettes, and artsy breast shapes.

Probably not stuff that should be shown to kids, but in the >1k samples I’ve run so far, I’ve yet to see anything jarring.

Are those surveys self-reported/verified or algorithmic assumptions? I feel like a lot of algorithms and criticisms assume default/normal/non-characteristic person as men, and are wrong because of that.

From the office hours, it's a self-reported quarterly survey, IIRC. So they're not sure how much of the growing skew is due to the demographics of Discord itself, how much is real, etc.

Sure, and there is a spectrum of

- naked because that's the default human

- naked and posed in a way that is artistically beautiful

- naked and posed in a way that is sexually provocative

SD is convinced past a certain threshold of flesh-colored space that it could fall into the sexually proactive group so they err on the side of caution. I'm not mad at them for defaulting to that. If you want to push past the default filter it's easy enough to remove. Seems sensible to me when the training set does include a lot of literal pornography.

I have yet to see an innocent prompt that results in a naked person posed in a sexually provocative way, but if someone discovered one, please post it along with a seed.

I don't fault SD for having a simply removable filter. I was ranting about the applications built on top of stable diffusion that force the filter to be engaged.

(But of course everyone is free to create the software they wish, I'm not entitled to complain it should work differently.)

SD has rather specific ideas of what women look like. They don't necessarily resemble the average real woman. Instagram is already giving little girls eating disorders, maybe such idealized depictions of women's bodies isn't healthy for society

I use SD with no filter and I wouldn't say it's rare. I do think some words trigger it more often than others. For example, I've seen a prompt with "beautiful" turn up half the results with nudity, whereas removing the word I got no nudity.

`Beautiful` is already pushing the model toward sexualizing her, I mean the subject is going to be beautiful by default since the model was trained on LAION Aesthetics.

But yes, `a beautiful woman` is a fairly innocent prompt. My experience (also using SD without the filter all the time) is that the model very rarely produces sexual results unless intentionally pushed that way. Perhaps our mileages vary.

Galleries aren't typically capable or in the business of producing millions of "naked pictures of celebrity x"? The body should be normalized but let's not think these tools used en masse will have that effect.

Should all the photo editors add a mandatory NSFW filter as well? How is this different?

https://pixlr.com/ is far better suited for producing naked picture of celebrity x than https://www.drawanything.app/

This exact example made me wonder how the 'bias' situation will ever be worked around (besides training the model to an individuals preexisting biases).

What should the picture of a 'woman' on wikipedia be? Should they be clothed? In western clothing? What skin color? Age? Surely everyone imagines something slightly different when they think 'woman'.

At the time of writing, it's this: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woman_at_Lover%27s...

Which is close to what I would've guessed by picking a high population density area, and a likely location and candidate for a decent portait photo on a wildly popular wiki.

Still not sure why the top was edited from red to grey.

Perfect example: English Wikipedia has bikeshedded lead images of this kind ad nauseum over these two decades, with many times more text written in discussions of this than in the articles themselves. The current image for [[woman]] was chosen last year in an RfC that ended with a rare counted vote.¹ This prompted a re-debate of [[human]]² that trailed off in dissastisfaction toward the only established guideline in the area, which forbids montages. That, in turn was last affirmed by a series of debates in 2015/2016.³

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Woman/Archive_19 ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Human/Archive_35#Argument... ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS:NOETHNICGALLERIES

Yeah, for starters one should at least try to provide a coherent operational definition of “bias”.

Well if you ask for just a woman you're going to get just the woman!

The LAION-5B dataset was curated by researchers at Heidelberg University, and while it was filtered for nsfw content, the human form is less of an issue in much of Europe compared to views and attitudes in the US.

"Person" is enough and SD knows that. No need to put gender as foundation of identity.

They're responding to a hysterical, Luddite portion of the public that would make them pay a PR cost if they didn't at least make a sloppy attempt at "safety". It's idiotic and futile, but blessedly short-lived.

Thanks to the miracle of open-source, it took me about 20 minutes yesterday to get Stable Diffusion up and running on my laptop's CPU, with no content filter. SD inference has low enough compute needs that using cloud GPU compute is cheap as hell (for now, perhaps), and discrete GPUs aren't that expensive in the grand scheme of things.

Ultimately, reality often does win. It's just not a stable equilibrium for companies to continue these laughable attempts at "filtering", any more than physical media formats were able to withstand the arrival of digital formats in the presence of piracy. Combine this with the cultural headwinds against the influence of mentally-ill hysterics on social media, and I don't expect the current level of filtering to last very long.

Serving child pornography would be a "pretty bad marketing move" and people are able to see clear picture of Jesus in damaged building elevation.

(it kind of sucks because assuming you can't eliminate pedophiles, fake content could be something that minimizes their damage)

I wonder how we will get around this one. Or do we get stuck and human artists will start only creating NSFW art? ;)

> fake content could be something that minimizes their damage

I don't claim to have any knowledge in the subject area, but it seems plausible that feeding habits of those who enjoy child pornography could instead embolden them to commit actions they would not have otherwise. At the very least, this seems like something to approach with extreme caution.

> At the very least, this seems like something to approach with extreme caution.

Like you, I'm not overly informed on the factual question here, but I don't understand why you think banning the content is somehow the cautious course of action.

The heuristics for which action is the "cautious" one is usually some combination of:

a) which outcome is less likely to be harmful b) which outcome is more passive (ie primum non nocere) c) which outcome is more predictable (eg the status quo)

It seems to me that bans fail on the first two counts[1] and squeak by on the third. Even this status quo argument is weakened by how new these bans are, and by the many contemporary countries in which fictionalized CP is legal.

[1] In the former case, this is based on the practically universal consensus that sexual preferences, even dangerous and deviant ones, are burned deeply into one's psyche and can't simply be ignored through lack of exposure. This view was most famously one of the strongest pillars of the successful iteration of the gay rights movement, and is why we consider conversion therapy to be horrific. One can make the claim that this factual claim only applies to gender preferences, but that seems quite an extraordinary claim.

> I don't understand why you think banning the content is somehow the cautious course of action.

I didn't intend to say that I think banning is the cautious course of action. My point was that the decision to ban or not ban should be approached carefully.

Ah, sorry for incorrectly assuming. I fully agree with you.

It's a very common tendency for people to smuggle their moral intuitions into calls for the precautionary principle, and this runs directly counter to _actually_ approaching these discussions with caution.

Same for me. Pretty much any prompt I tried produced a nsfw error...

I got the same warning for "hollow earth". I guess conspiracy theories are also NSFW? https://i.imgur.com/oJR84Hd.png

It marks it NSFW about half the time with 100% stock input for me.

broken for me too. wouldn't render a smiley face. "draw anything" is misleading.

yeeah it seems maybe 'baby' triggers the nsfw filter?

Just prompt it again, did that for me every once in a while too.

I'm using replicate as the AI backend. They're the ones that are flagging the content. There's probably some tuning that I can do but I haven't dug into it.

You'll have to retry, rephrase, or edit the image to get past that.

The NSFW filter is in the stable-diffusion library you're calling. Disable the line that sets image, has_nsfw_concept in image2image.py, (or whatever your code calling the library looks like).

Correction: Replicate is handling this just fine. This setting is baked into Stable Diffusion.

Yeah, that's what I meant, but inexplicitly was downvoted…

smiling forest: ok

smiling forest, photorealism: nsfw detected