20 years after Mark Zuckerbergās infamous āhot-or-notā website, developers have learned absolutely nothing.
Two decades after Mark Zuckerberg created FaceMash, the infamously sexist āhot-or-notā website that served as the precursor to Facebook, a developer has had the bright idea to do the exact same thingāthis time with all the women generated by AI.
A new website, smashorpass.ai, feels like a sick parody of Zuckerbergās shameful beginnings, but is apparently meant as an earnest experiment exploring the capabilities of AI image recommendation. Just like Zuckās original site, āSmash or Passā shows images of women and invites users to rate them with a positive or negative response. The only difference is that all the āwomenā are actually AI generated images, and exhibit many of the telltale signs of the sexist bias common to image-based machine learning systems.
For starters, nearly all of the imaginary women generated by the site have cartoonishly large breasts, and their faces have an unsettling airbrushed quality that is typical of AI generators. Their figures are also often heavily outlined and contrasted with backgrounds, another dead giveaway for AI generated images depicting people. Even more disturbing, some of the images omit faces altogether, depicting headless feminine figures with enormous breasts.
According to the siteās novice developer, Emmet Halm, the site is a āgenerative AI party gameā that requires āno further explanation.ā
āYou know what to do, boys,ā Halm tweeted while introducing the project, inviting men to objectify the female form in a fun and novel way. His tweet debuting the website garnered over 500 retweets and 1,500 likes. In a follow-up tweet, he claimed that the top 3 images on the site all had roughly 16,000 āsmashes.ā
Understandably, AI experts find the project simultaneously horrifying and hilariously tonedeaf. āItās truly disheartening that in the 20 years since FaceMash was launched, technology is still seen as an acceptable way to objectify and gather clicks,ā Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at HuggingFace, told Motherboard after using the Smash or Pass website.
One developer, Rona Wang, responded by making a nearly identical parody website that rates menānot based on their looks, but how likely they are to be dangerous predators of women.
The sexist and racist biases exhibited by AI systems have been thoroughly documented, but that hasnāt stopped many AI developers from deploying apps that inherit those biases in new and often harmful ways. In some cases, developers espousing āanti-wokeā beliefs have treated bias against women and marginalized people as a feature of AI, and not a bug. With virtually no evidence, some conservative outrage jockeys have claimed the oppositeāthat AI is āwokeā because popular tools like ChatGPT wonāt say racial slurs.
The developerās initial claims about the siteās capabilities seem to be exaggerated. In a series of tweets, Halm claimed the project is a ārecursively self-improvingā image recommendation engine that uses the data collected from your clicks to determine your preference in AI-generated women. But the currently-existing version of the site doesnāt actually self-improveāusing the site long enough results in many of the images repeating, and Halm says the recursive capability will be added in a future version.
Itās also not gone over well with everyone on social media. One blue-check user responded, āBro wtf is this. The concept of finetuning your aesthetic GenAI image tool is cool but you definitely could have done it with literally any other category to prove the concept, like food, interior design, landscapes, etc.ā
Halm could not be reached for comment.
āIām in the arena trying stuff,ā Halm tweeted. āSome ideas just need to exist.ā
Luccioni points out that no, they absolutely do not.
āThere are huge amounts of nonhuman data that is available and this tool could have been used to generate images of cars, kittens, or plantsāand yet we see machine-generated images of women with big breasts,ā said Luccioni. āAs a woman working in the male-dominated field of AI, this really saddens me.ā
This is like dunking on DeviantArt because it has artists who make cheesecake pictures of ladies. Iām not saying itās something I personally enjoy, but who am I to tell others what art they should enjoy?
The only way for this to be consistent is if you believe authorial intent or real practical effects on an audience have no bearing on the properties of a piece of media.
As long as itās fiction, itās okay?
Unless the author writes an essay to accompany their piece, I think any conclusion you make about authorial intent is speculative. A beefcake pic of a guy in speedos lifting weights could be sexual, or maybe the artist is doing a study in human musculature? Heck if I know.
Effects on the audience, Iām not sure I understand that. Itās up to the audience to decide whether they like something, or not, or whether they are happy with whatever āeffectsā it has on them. The effect most are interested in is āpleasureā, I think. If one doesnāt like the pics, one is not in the audience for that art.
If one wants to make the argument that folks shouldnāt look at cheesecake or beefcake pics, because they create some sort of problem for the viewer, the onus is on the claimant to win the hearts and minds of the audience. As long as all parties are consenting adults making informed decisions, I donāt see the issue.
I do concur that it could be āsexistā in the same sense that anybody discriminating based on sexual preference is sexist, but Iām not sure that is wrong. Someone who prefers lady types as sexual partners may prefer to look at cheesecake pics of lady types, I guess, and thatās technically sexist because theyāre choosing those pics based on lady characteristics.
Now if you want to argue that such pics have downstream effects on a vulnerable/disempowered population, that would be a different argument.
We have no control over who we are attracted to sexually (or not at all), but we do have control over how we interact with the world. Who you are attracted to cannot be sexist, racist, etc. because there is no intention - it merely is. Being attracted and choosing to objectify someone are two very distinct processes because one involves intention. Discrimination is also an act of intent.
What āsomeoneā is being objectified in this case?
Iām merely explaining why it is not analogous and why attraction cannot be considered bigoted. Anything that involves intent can be criticized for bigotry if it is present.
Thatās fair. Thank you.
That is literally the argument in question about this whole post. š¤¦
Your rant about not being able to do any rhetorical analysis without an author spelling it out for you is really not my problem. Maybe donāt criticize it if you have no practice doing it in the first place.
Your willful misunderstanding of how objectification in fiction can ever be any more problematic than ādiscrimination based on sexual preferencesā is justā¦ Wow.
I can only respond to the complaint you made:
ā¦ not the one you imagine you made.
To be clear, I disagree with this:
To clarify, I donāt think the authorās intent really matters in art. If one is interested in context, then itās a useful context.
In this case, the images have no āauthorā, theyāre a machine output, so Iām not sure how you think authorial intent figures in this.
EDIT: My mistake, Iām mixing up responses. I should further clarify that, in the case of cheesecake/beefcake pics on DeviantArt (the example I gave), there clearly is an author/artist. But ultimately Iām still not sure it matters what their intent is. Do they like drawing lingerie as an artistic subject, or do they like drawing ladies for sexual titillation? Iām not sure there is any moral imperative on the viewer to care.