AI generated porn project banned from Kickstarter

An "ethical" group creating pornography from artificial intelligence raised over $56,000 from almost 900 backers, doubling its original goal of $25,000. Now, it's been shut down by Kickstarter as a result of its new rules on what AI projects it will and will not allow.

AI art is a prickly topic. It's exciting as a toy to sink 20 to 25 minutes into - we gave WOMBO.art a handful of games to transform into surrealist representations of its original imagery. High on Life, one of the most popular shooters on Xbox at the moment, used Midjourney AI to create some of its environments and another AI program was used to prototype character voices. It's so easy, isn't it? It sparks the question why we would even require human artists and human voice actors in the future.

It is this human element here that has incited a large number of concerns over Unstable Diffusion's venture into pornography generation from a data set of risque artworks and real images. "With $25,000 in funding, we can afford to train the new model with 75 million high quality images consisting of ~25 million anime and cosplay images, ~25 million artistic images from Artstation/DeviantArt/Behance, and ~25 million photographic pictures," explained the group in its Kickstarter goals.

Unstable Diffusion's Discord server is an "ethical" space, claimed one of the admin team in an interview with TechCrunch, where requests for named individuals, child pornography, deep fakes and excessive gore will be blocked. Yet, as the data set becomes bigger and bigger as per its own ambitions, it's not clear how the team is going to stop non-consensual pornography from being generated. There's also the fact that it's taking from people's artwork and photographs, and they might not have given permission in the first place.

Kickstarter's recent statement ensures an unsettled stance on AI projects at the moment, citing "really tricky and undefined areas" of content creation, but Unstable Diffusion has definitely been considered a violation of its nascent terms. "One thing is clear: Kickstarter must, and will always be, on the side of creative work and the humans behind that work. We’re here to help creative work thrive," said CEO Everette Taylor.