President Joe Biden's administration is pushing the tech industry and financial institutions to shut down a growing market of abusive sexual images made with artificial intelligence technology. New generative AI tools have made it easy to transform someone's likeness into a sexually explicit AI deepfake and share those realistic images across chatrooms or social media. The victims — be they celebrities or children — have little recourse to stop it.
As generative AI broke on the scene, everyone was speculating about where the first real harms would come. And I think we have the answer,' said Biden's chief science adviser Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. She described to The Associated Press a 'phenomenal acceleration' of nonconsensual imagery fueled by AI tools and largely targeting women and girls in a way that can upend their lives.
The private sector should step up to 'disrupt the monetization' of image-based sexual abuse, restricting payment access particularly to sites that advertise explicit images of minors, the administration said. Prabhakar said many payment platforms and financial institutions already say that they won't support the kinds of businesses promoting abusive imagery. 'But sometimes it’s not enforced; sometimes they don’t have those terms of service,' she said.
The Stanford Internet Observatory in December said it found thousands of images of suspected child sexual abuse in the giant AI database LAION, an index of online images and captions that’s been used to train leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion. London-based Stability AI, which owns the latest versions of Stable Diffusion, said this week that it 'did not approve the release' of the earlier model reportedly used by the Wisconsin man.