To be fair, there is substantial interest in using things like Stable Diffusion to generate pornography. There are several projects for hentai, etc.
There have also been large threads on /g/ teaching people how to generate hypernerworks with suspiciously young looking subjects since the beginning. The "icky stuff" has a disturbing footprint.
Wanting to making pornography is perfectly normal and healthy; that's not something I consider icky. When I quoted "icky stuff" I thought we were talking about the generation of underage subjects.
Have you seen ANY legal age subjects? Subjectively, how much fraction of anime pictures do you consider to be portraying individuals able to consent?
I mean, if there was an NN code that is returning 0.0120000 for 85% in inference data but ranging evenly between 0.0 to 1.0 in training, intuition shouldn't be that it's the reality that is broken.
But it kind of is depending on your definition of icky. The fact that they've trained the models to be extremely proficient forgers should raise all sorts of red flags. I get the concept of homage and every great artist borrows/steals, blah blah, but as these things continue to get better, the lines between legit artist work and forgery will only blur to unknowable. Digital artists will now need to know how to cryptographically sign their work. There have been tools for this that most ignore because of pricing. (and no i'm not talking about NFT nonsense)