Thursday, January 25, 2024

Sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift went viral on Twitter after being created with a Microsoft AI generator and shared in a Telegram group dedicated to the practice

(Has there ever been a study as to how much Google owed its success to making non-consensual images easily discoverable in Image search?)

 404 Media:

The Telegram group recommends that members use Microsoft’s AI image generator called Designer, and users often share prompts to help others circumvent the protections Microsoft has put in place. For example, 404 Media’s testing found that Designer will not generate an image of “Jennifer Aniston,” but we were able to generate suggestive images of the actress by using the phrase “ jennifer ‘actor’ aniston.” Prior to the Swift AI images going viral on Twitter, a user in the Telegram group recommended that members use the phrase “Taylor ‘singer’ Swift” to generate images. 404 Media was unable to recreate the type of images that were posted to Twitter, but we found that Microsoft’s Designer would not generate images of “Taylor Swift,” but did generate images of “Taylor ‘singer’ Swift.”

Related, and speaking of Google, the NY Times explores how "obituary pirates" flood search results with factually-erroneous, LLM-generated obituaries after a teenager died in an unfortunate accident:

In the hours after his death, friends and family scrambled to find out more about [the teen]’s death. Few details were available — no obituary, no news stories.

But as people searched Google for information, someone on the other side of the world was searching for exactly the kinds of reverberations that [his] death had caused.

[A]n internet marketer in India, knew nothing about [the teen]. But suddenly, enough people were searching for “[that name]” to push his name up a list of trending Google search topics that [the marketer] was monitoring as part of a digital moneymaking scheme.

To [the marketer], the rising interest meant that an audience for online content that did not yet exist was growing rapidly before his eyes. He was poised to deliver it.

Also: