There is this obsessed congresscreature from Missouri, Ann Wagner, who really really hates porn (she’s a Republican, as if you couldn’t guess.) She’s been crusading against sex workers for years, and her latest idea is that she wants to shut down OnlyFans, because, she claims, it enables sex trafficking. She’s full of it.
However, the one good thing she has done is that she motivated an OnlyFans performer, Cherie DeVille, to write a defense of OnlyFans’ techniques to prevent abuse of the site. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get a site there, and they are extremely strict about preventing minors from getting access, and to prevent its use for prostitution. I was impressed at the level of scrutiny they apply to their performers to make sure there is no non-consensual imagery.
Anti-porn zealots act as if OnlyFans tries to post non-consensual sexual content. But sex workers’ experiences tell a different story. One of my friends had surgery on her labia, and when she returned from the doctor and resumed posting, OnlyFans flagged her content. OnlyFans uses AI to monitor people, and its AI identified her labia as a different woman’s vulva. The site prevented her from airing the content without uploading an ID for this supposed new individual. I struggle to imagine a non-consensual porn epidemic on OnlyFans when it’s this strict about identifying individual vulvas.
That seems redundant and excessive to me. You know they’ve got lots of human eyeballs staring at bits of human anatomy, wouldn’t having users flag surprises in their videos be sufficient, without using computers to stare, too? They’re burning bandwidth that someone has to pay for! Also, I worry about what we’re training AI to become.
Aha! So this is how the GOP can check your genitals before letting you into the bathroom of your choice. Just upload a picture to the cloud, and have AI gaze at it.
How do they do that?
Asking for a friend.
Actually, I really don’t have any idea how they check for age on internet porn sites.
I’ve never visited Onlyfans and it just isn’t too high on my list of websites to visit.
I thought it was hard which is why Pornhub keeps pulling out of states that pass age restricted laws.
OK, this is what Google has to say.
In fact, the link I hit took me to…the Onlyfans website.
.1. They do carefully screen their creator’s accounts for age.
.2. They don’t carefully screen their viewer’s accounts for age.
I suppose as long as the credit card or other payment methods work, they don’t much care.
.3. I do quite often get messages on web pages asking me if I am over 18. Often for innocuous content that isn’t porn, lately involving the war in Ukraine for some reason.
I correctly tell the web page that yeah, I’m over 18.
How rigorous is that anyway?
I’d be surprised if anyone has ever said no, I’m not over 18.
Still wondering what AI is used for? Almost any paper-pushing redundant task that can be defined by rules can benefit from some form of AI whether it’s natural language processing, image processing, etc. with some human-in-the-loop supervision.
I recently got an estimate for auto body repairs from our insurance company which had this paragraph in it:
I’m looking forward to the future applications of this AI to replace “facial recognition login” systems which use public features with new systems that uses more private information.
Ok…here’s the ultimate use of high-tech systems:
If you want to read more about this wondrous application you can find it here on Sky News.
And another one, also from the ACM TechNews email I get. If you’re wondering why AI related technologies are booming right now, I think this suggests an answer:
This one is from Time magazine.
It doesn’t take an AI or a genius to know that when the US government pumps that much money into military related development, you’re going to have a lot of “progress”…of some sort, or other.
Our military wastes a prodigious amount of money on ridiculous things. Because they can.
In the news: AI photos show people with secondary breast cancer their lost future
What are we training Ai to be? We’re training them to be like us. Note for instance that LLMs tend to lie and have hallucinations. They won’t be angels, and they won’t be devils; we don’t deserve either. They’ll be funhouse reflections of ourselves, weird but revealing, which is exactly what we deserve.
By the way, in my preceding post I used “Ai” instead of “AI”. I did to distinguish it from “Al”, as in A.L., for Alan or Alfred. Also because they display intelligence, not Intelligence.