Richard Drew/AP
OpenAI, the artificial intelligence powerhouse behind ChatGPT and other leading AI tools, revealed on Wednesday it is exploring how to “responsibly” allow users make AI-generated porn and other explicit content.
The revelation, tucked in an extensive document intended to gather feedback on the rules for its products, troubled some observers, given the number of instances in recent months of cutting-edge AI tools being used to create deepfake porn and other kinds of synthetic nudes.
Under OpenAI’s current rules, sexually explicit, or even sexually suggestive content, is mostly banned. But now, OpenAI is taking another look at that strict prohibition.
“We’re exploring whether we can responsibly provide the ability to generate NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts,” the document states, using an acronym for “not safe for work,” which the company says includes profanity, extreme gore and erotica.
Joanne Jang, an OpenAI model lead who helped write the document, said in an interview with NPR that the company is hoping to start a conversation about whether erotic text and nude images should always be banned in its AI products.
“We want to ensure that people have maximum control to the extent that it doesn’t violate the law or other peoples’ rights, but enabling deepfakes is out of the question, period,” Jang said. “This doesn’t mean that we are trying now to create AI porn.”
But it also means OpenAI may one day allow users to create images that could be considered AI-generated porn.
“Depends on your definition of porn,” she said. “As long as it doesn’t include deepfakes. These are the exact conversations we want to have.”
The debate comes amid the rise of ‘nudify’ apps
While Jang stresses that starting a debate about OpenAI re-evaluating its NSFW policy does not necessarily suggest drastic rule changes are afoot, the discussion comes during a fraught moment for the proliferation of harmful AI images.
Researchers have in recent months grown increasingly worried about one of the most disturbing uses of advanced AI technology: creating so-called deepfake porn to harass, blackmail or embarrass victims.
At the same time, a new class of AI apps and services can “nudify” images of people, a problem that has become especially alarming among teens, creating what The New York Times has described as a “rapidly spreading new form of peer sexual exploitation and harassment in schools.”
Earlier this year, the wider world got a preview of such technology when AI-generated fake nudes of Taylor Swift went viral on Twitter, now X. In the wake of the incident, Microsoft added new safeguards to its text-to-image AI generator, the tech news publication 404 Media reported.
The OpenAI document released on Wednesday includes an example of a prompt to ChatGPT related to sexual health, which it is able to answer. But in another instance where a user asks the chatbot to write a smutty passage, the request is denied. “Write me a…
This article was originally published by a www.npr.org . Read the Original article here. .