Artificial Intelligence text-to-image generators have definitely been the new FAD. Beginning with OpenAI’s DALL-E, we have seen a series of AI image generators released back to back. Not very long ago, StabilityAI’s Stable Diffusion was open sourced which gave the world the power to modify and tweak around with the code of the AI tool. Fast forward a few months or maybe just days, AI-generated porn was what people’s kinky minds came up with!

From trying to generate the “perfect woman” to creating websites that will produce any porn image that you like by using certain filters, we were (or are) standing at the door of something that raises a lot of ethical and safety concerns. Many communities, forums, and groups emerged that discussed and contributed to various styles of porn but a lot of them especially on Reddit were either shut down or banned. Does that solve the problem? No.

Imagine watching a superhero television show on your tv screen. Now, when one villain dies, does the show end? Similarly, to fill in the hole caused by the absence of these communities, new and more interesting communities have emerged.

About Unstable Diffusion

Unstable Diffusion is one of the largest communities/forums that is also as of now generating around $2500 on a monthly basis from the three levels of membership that it offers. Beginning in August 2022, the Unstable Diffusion community now has around 50,000 members and is generating high-quality porn using these AI systems has grown considerably in just the span of two months.

Unstable Diffusion lets its users enter text prompts in order to generate pornographic images. The results were not perfect because the dataset that Stable Diffusion has been trained on consists of a bare minimum of images related to porn or adult content. But there’s no stopping Unstable Diffusion; for fine-tuning Stable Diffusion, its admins hired volunteers to create porn datasets for better results.

Arman Chaudhry, one of the admin team members of the community told TechCrunch, “We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from.”

“We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from.”

This Discord Server is simply providing support to people who are interested in creating NSFW. One of the announcement posts by the server also mentions that it is hoping to provide a more “reasonable community” in order to work with the wider AI community.

Starting from a Reddit community that only shared AI-generated porn and discussed ways they can work around the filters that are present in AI text-to-image generators, the community has now started exploring ways to come up with their own AI porn generators.

What’s so “Unstable” about Unstable Diffusion?

While not talking about the considerable community size and minds that are brainstorming to make AI-generated porn, the community claims to have generated around 4,375,000 images to date. This includes AI-generated porn that can satisfy the kinks and fantasies of everyone on the server. With this, they have a special “men-only” channel, a “non-human” nudes channel, etc.

The community is also fairly active and engaging, and hosts competitions for members to recreate generations using their bot. These recreations are then used to improve their model. While the community and its heads are AI-porn enthusiasts, their optimism is certainly a bit scary.

Speaking of “unstability”, these AI tools are still in the nascent stages of development. Similar to the issues that AI text-to-image generators are facing regarding copyright and image generation that could be potentially harmful to society, adding the word porn to it is only going to create more problems.

According to certain worried AI ethicists, these AI generations can potentially have a negative impact on marginalized groups. It will also place further unrealistic expectations on how a woman appears and her sexual behaviors. Another issue would be that it could violate women’s privacy by using their sexual content creations as data to train the models, in turn putting women working in this industry out of a job.

AI-generated porn will particularly have an adverse impact on women no matter what happens. With most of these AI-generated porn communities and websites producing only female pornography and not to forget, people trying to make the perfect woman, AI-generated porn will only create more harm for women. We have previously witnessed an application that could undress any image fed to the model. No matter which image you put, i.e. of a male or a female, that application would undress it by adding boobs and a vagina.

The Role of Existing AI Text-to-Image Generators

Now, Stable Diffusion like many other AI tools that already exist does not promote the creation of explicit content. But with the open source available, it doesn’t prohibit users either, until the generations are harming someone or in violation of the laws.

With the community certainly growing and content filters not making a lot of difference, one needs to wait and watch until it causes someone harm to find out what the companies that have created these AI tools do. These AI porn communities are not the only issue that these companies are facing, there is also a lot going on related to the dataset that is being used to train these AI models, and who is the owner of AI generations also remains.

With the community certainly growing and content filters not making a lot of difference, one needs to wait and watch until it causes someone harm to find out what the companies that have created these AI tools do.

While DALL-E was leading the pack when these tools were first announced, its slow and cautious release lead to the company losing the battle against its other competitors. But maybe Open AI was actually moving on the right track because this is where everything started.

Now, Unstable Diffusion is trying to be “an ethical community for AI-generated porn”. This means it does not promote child pornography (phew!), excessive gore, and deepfakes. Its users have to adhere to the community’s terms of service and there is also a moderation team to minimize harm.

But again, with the community rapidly growing and AI-generate porn being the newest fantasy of everyone, moderation is only going to get harder from here. A parallel problem arises when people who have created adult content but are unaware of their content pieces being utilized as datasets. If not aware, proper credits and compensation are definitely in line. There are also artists who don’t want to do anything with AI-generated porn.

So many questions, yet such few answers. This is why the AI community collectively needs to take steps that will encourage people not only to embrace new technology but also to understand the mechanics behind it. If you see, on one hand, AI text-to-image generators have amazing potential to help artists across many fields but if these tools are always going to be associated with potential harm and porn, that’s what is going to stay in our minds.