Some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies.

Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or unwilling to enforce their policies about who can buy ads on their platforms.

While parent company Meta’s Ad Library, which archives ads on its platforms, who paid for them, and where and when they were posted, shows that the company has taken down several of these ads previously, many ads that explicitly invited users to create nudes and some ad buyers were up until I reached out to Meta for comment. Some of these ads were for the best known nonconsensual “undress” or “nudify” services on the internet.

  • Max-PEnglish
    167•7 months ago

    Seen similar stuff on TikTok.

    That’s the big problem with ad marketplaces and automation, the ads are rarely vetted by a human, you can just give them money, upload your ad and they’ll happily display it. They rely entirely on users to report them which most people don’t do because they’re ads and they wont take it down unless it’s really bad.

    • @Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
      56•7 months ago

      It’s especially bad on reels/shorts for pretty much all platforms. Tons of financial scams looking to steal personal info or worse. And I had one on a Facebook reel that was for boner pills that was legit a minute long ad of hardcore porn. Not just nudity but straight up uncensored fucking.

    • @alyth@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11•7 months ago

      The user reports are reviewed by the same model that screened the ad up-front so it does jack shit

      • Max-PEnglish
        16•7 months ago

        Actually, a good 99% of my reports end up in the video being taken down. Whether it’s because of mass reports or whether they actually review it is unclear.

        What’s weird is the algorithm still seems to register that as engagement, so lately I’ve been reporting 20+ videos a day because it keeps showing them to me on my FYP. It’s wild.

    • PennomiEnglish
      -18•7 months ago

      Okay this is going to be one of the amazingly good uses of the newer multimodal AI, it’ll be able to watch every submission and categorize them with a lot more nuance than older classifier systems.

      We’re probably only a couple years away from seeing a system like that in production in most social media companies.

      • kbin_space_program
        19•7 months ago

        Nice pipe dream, but the current fundamental model of AI is not and cannot be made deterministic. Until that fundamental chamge is developed, it isnt possible.

        • @fuckthepolice@lemm.eeEnglish
          13•7 months ago

          the current fundamental model of AI is not and cannot be made deterministic.

          I have to constantly remind people about this very simple fact of AI modeling right now. Keep up the good work!

        • PennomiEnglish
          -3•7 months ago

          What do you mean? AI absolutely can be made deterministic. Do you have a source to back up your claim?

          You know what’s not deterministic? Human content reviewers.

          Besides, determinism isn’t important for utility. Even if AI classified an ad wrong 5% of the time, it’d still massively clean up the spammy advertisers. But they’re far, FAR more accurate than that.

            • PennomiEnglish
              1•7 months ago

              Again, you are wrong. Specifically ChatGPT may not be able to be deterministic since it’s a hosted service, but you absolutely can replay a prompt using the same random seed to get deterministic responses. Computer randomness isn’t truly random.

              But if that’s not satisfying enough, you can also configure the temperature to be zero and system fingerprinting to always be the same, and that makes it even more deterministic, since it will always use the highest probability token.

              For example, Llama can be fully deterministic. https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/25507#issuecomment-1678498896

              • kbin_space_program
                2•7 months ago

                I love your wishful thinking. Too bad academia doesnt agree with you.

                Edit: also, I have to come back to laugh at you for trying to argue that the almost random nature of software random number generators is deterministic AI.

                • PennomiEnglish
                  1•7 months ago

                  Please enlighten me then. Clearly people are doing it, as proved by the link I sent. Are you simply going to ignore that? Perhaps we have different definitions of determinism.

                  • kbin_space_program
                    2•7 months ago

                    You can make it more deterministic by reducing the acceptable range of answers, absolutely. But then you also limit your output, so thats never really a good use case.

                    Randomness is a core functionality of not just LLMs, but the entire stack that has resulted in LLMs. Yes you can get a decently consistent answer, but not a deterministic one. Put another way, with LLMs being at max constraint, you can ask them to add 1+1. You’ll usually get 2. But not nearly always.