- cross-posted to:
- feminism@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- feminism@lemmy.ml
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
Removed by mod
Not the case at all, enjoy a 14 day ban. Try thinking about what you did wrong.