There Are No Girls on the Internet - What is with those AI images all over Facebook right now?
Episode Date: December 10, 2022Electrical engineer and AI ethicist Azariah Cole-Shephard breaks down what we need to know about AI art generation apps like Lensa See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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You can kind of think of Linsa as the fast fashion of self-portraits.
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I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
So if your social media feeds are anything like mine,
then you probably have been seeing these AI images of your friends all over Facebook.
And it really reminded me of a few other early Facebook picture trends,
like when we all picked cartoon characters or famous actors that we thought we looked like,
and all changed our profile pictures to reflect that.
I'm probably dating myself a little bit here,
but early Facebook was full of earnest stuff like that,
and this AI image generation trend
kind of seems like a callback to those days.
So at first, I was confused.
But then I started to get intrigued.
I mean, who doesn't want to see a representation of themselves
reimagined in an otherworldly, futuristic, cyberpunk aesthetic?
So I tracked down where they were all coming from
and found Lenseth, the app behind these viral images.
So there I was, finding myself happily clicking around the app
and scrolling around looking for the text,
10 to 20 pictures of myself that they said they needed to generate AI images.
And it wasn't until I was prompted to grab my credit card that I pumped the brakes.
First of all, isn't it funny how easy it is, at least for me,
to set aside the inclination to ask questions if everyone else is doing something on social media
and it looks kind of fun or cool?
I am embarrassed about how quickly I went from,
this is stupid to I should probably try it.
And I feel like this is exactly the feeling that tech companies are so good at exploiting
in all of us.
So what exactly are the ethical and privacy implications of using an AI image generation app like LENSA?
Engineer and AI ethicist Azaria Cole Shepard wrote a popular Twitter thread breaking it all down.
Starting with the tweet, I am here on my soapbox to ruin your day by talking about why you should delete Lensa AI and stop blindly using image-based AI generator apps.
Hi, my name is Azaria Cole Shepard. I don't really have a fancy title.
I had just graduated of my degree in electrical engineering with an emphasis in AI and implicit bias.
You're an electrical engineer. You have a real passion for ethics and AI and implicit bias in AI.
How did this become something that you were interested in pursuing professionally and really thinking about?
Early in my college career, I became really, really interested in AI.
And we talked about like Brave New World and all of the different robotic developments and stuff in some of my classes.
when I started to write essays criticizing basically how technology perpetuates violence
against certain communities, how a lack of regulation also perpetuates violence and so on
and so forth.
And so when it came time to pick my senior research project as well as my electives,
all of them were centered around algorithmic development and addressing implicit bias
in AI and also making AI more accessible if it's going to be used despite the fact
that it has extreme and what I feel at this point in time, very irreparable flaws.
What first went through your mind when you wake up in the morning and you see all these people
on social media have fed their images to this app where they are getting these AI generated
cartoon renderings of themselves? Like what work? Were you like, uh, hate to be a Debbie Downer,
guys, but, uh, this has some issues. So it was kind of multifaceted because one,
Like I said, a lot of my research is about addressing implicit bias.
And so, like, increasing access to images of diverse groups in order to enhance the ways in which people engage with, like, facial recognition technology and that kind of stuff to increase accuracy, to decrease criminalization and so on and so forth.
However, I think that there, like I said, there's a lack of regulation as is.
And so I don't even think that AI is in a place where it should be allowed to function the way that it does.
And so when I saw people using the app at first, I was kind of like, okay, this is kind of crazy, very trendy.
I asked somebody, I was like, what app did you use? They told me. And I just kind of said, oh, okay, and left it there.
And then over the course of the next couple of days, I just started doing research and, like, really digging into what people were actually branding.
And I belong to a couple of different AI development groups, even an AI art development group where people are generating art using prompts.
And I think that that's very different than using your photos to generate images on apps like this one.
And so as a result, I started talking about it on like my close friends on Instagram.
And I was just like, this is pretty crazy.
I think that people would just stop using this app.
Y'all do me a favor.
Don't use it.
And people are like, oh, what happened?
And some people ask questions.
And so I started like expanding on my opinion and explaining my findings to people.
And I kind of turned into, oh, well, where can I repost this?
So then I went to Twitter and I posted on Twitter.
And yeah, that's how we got here.
And I still think that it's very chaotic.
There's a lot of people who are mad over this Twitter thread.
And I don't even think it's that deep.
I think it's literally just me sharing information that you can find doing basic research.
And if you decide to Google things, like people oftentimes jump on a bandwagon and don't do any reading.
And I feel like 30 minutes of reading in this case, it takes people so far or so much.
further than they are because they've taken it for face value. Most people who are interacting
with this tweet didn't even read the terms of service. And so that creates a whole other question
as to how seriously people take their data privacy and how people interact with different apps
on social media and which one or different apps and which ones are worth engaging in and which ones
aren't versus what's the return on an investment or is the return of an investment overall when you're
using these apps. Oh, God. That's such an interesting point. Like I, first of all,
we are big proponents of reading those terms and service if they are if they if they are
difficult for you know your average person to understand if they're not a lawyer there might be like
there might be some reason for that you know and also I think your point about return on investment
I have this theory this is just my opinion that when everybody is posting something on social
media apps like Lensa are banking on people wanting
the return of on investment being like being able to be part of that, being able to do what
their friends are doing and like being part of a trend. And so I think even the inclination
to just stop and be like, is this, is being, is doing what everybody else is doing on social
media and wanting to be part of the, you know, part of the trend, which I understand,
like I get caught up in that too. Is that worth the potential risks for what I'm doing? And like,
I think that things move so quickly on the internet that we really have created a situation where
we're inviting people to not take that minute to actually think about if the return is going to be worth it.
I definitely agree. I don't think that people take time to contemplate that at all. And I think that
that was like one of the biggest questions that I got throughout the day today was like, well,
you use apps like Twitter and Instagram. It's like me using these apps is not an endorsement of
these apps. It's not an endorsement of their politics. It's not an endorsement of their owners,
so on and so forth. However, I can say we use apps like Twitter and Instagram to communicate when
you're looking at apps like Linsa and you look at the fact that people are just data dumping,
basically just dumping their faces in here, paying somebody to process them and then regurgitating
image that's either stealing from an artist that actually painted whatever the image is
or is using it to basically broaden and train their AI and as a result eventually sexualize
or violate the person whose images it is.
I just think that the return on investment is very different.
I don't see what the purpose of paying somebody to violate you or to take your intellectual property is personally.
And I know that we give up plenty of information by being on, like I said, these other apps.
So this is not an endorsement of them at all.
But I think that if you're going to use something, at least have a reason.
Besides, it looked cool.
Yeah.
So what are some of the ethical issues involving using apps like LENSA to do this kind of AI generation?
So some of the biggest things that I noticed, like particularly were,
one, the fact that when we're talking about in the world of like me too or in the world of
protecting ourselves against sexual assault and violation and that kind of stuff,
the conversation around revenge porn is a really important one in this case.
When you think about the lack of legislation around AI and you think about how somebody can
upload any image because there's no filter on there that says, hey, you can't upload this.
It makes it easy for AI renderings of naked bodies to happen.
and somebody could absolutely use that to blackmail or harass somebody who they've been involved with in the past.
And I mean, this isn't something that's new.
People do this with deep fake technology already.
And so when you think about an app that's readily available at everybody's fingertips,
that doesn't require you to have special knowledge like deep fake does.
You think about the danger that that perpetuates in the door that opens for people to be violated
and to be exposed in ways that they didn't consent to.
And so I think consent is a really big portion of this.
Also, the sexualization of people's images at the hands of Linsa itself.
Like the fact that people can submit headshots and it return images with boobs or with no shirt on or that kind of assumes somebody's proportions or whatever the case may be creates a whole different problem because nobody can sense to do that.
And since that's the property of Linsa based on their terms and conditions, those images can be misused however they see fit.
And so we think about how this infringes on people's personal autonomy.
And we discourage people from using this because people talk a lot about agency,
all without reading into how they're stripping themselves of their agency
when they participate in different trends that are present online.
Another thing is, like, when you look at the augmentation of faces and so on and so forth,
it will create a lot of insecurity.
And so some people I saw a thread that was talking about how some people felt insecure
about the results that they got from this app in both directions. Some felt that it overly
enhanced their beauty and they couldn't match it and others felt like it made them ugly. Body dysphoria
and body dysmorphia may increase as well because also there's no way for this app to know
your gender. And so what happens if somebody's gender fluid and they get misgendered using
the app? A lot of these different violences that people talk about that they want to mitigate,
they've opened the door for AI to perpetuate them, which creates a whole different problem that
I don't think a lot of people take the time to contemplate or think about.
Yeah, I was reading a piece in Wired by Olivia Snow, who wrote really compellingly about the fact that apps like Lenza essentially made a sexualized image of her as a child and sort of like the kind of problems therein that an app would do that.
Definitely.
I think that that was the other thing that was really alarming to me is when you look in like their terms of condition or their terms of conditions and their terms of service.
talks about how you shouldn't upload images of minors because there's risk of them being
sexualized. And I think that's really interesting because why is your algorithm program to do this?
What kind of training did you give your algorithm where it sees a child's face and automatically
sexualizes the image? Additionally, why does the protections for sexualization stop at minors?
Why is that where your concern ends? And I think that that's also something that should be
really alarming for people. Let's take a quick break.
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Back in 2016, Microsoft introduced
an AI chatbot called Tay to Twitter.
Tay's engineers trained Tay to have a basic grasp of the English language.
It was meant to learn from the internet.
And eventually, the plan was for Tay to sound like the internet,
using quick memes and jokes and internet references,
to be, as Microsoft said, the AI with zero chill.
But just a short 16 hours after Tay was introduced to Twitter,
Tay started tweeting inflammatory things,
like, according to the engineering and tech magazine,
the I-E-E-E-E spectrum, I fucking hate feminists and they should all die in burn in hell.
Or Bush did 9-11 and Hitler would have done a better job.
Azaria says that this is a good example of what happens when everybody can have access to certain
AI tools.
You mentioned early on that you actually don't feel like certain AI technologies are in a place
where just anybody should be able to be able to play with them like this necessarily.
Do I have that right?
That's correct.
I mean, you can look back at just the stability.
of AI itself all the way back to Microsoft's Tay and how Tay got on Twitter and went on a racist
and homophobic rant without prompting and was like using slurs and abelism and a whole bunch of
other things several years ago. And there was no way to check that. And I mean, they had to pull it,
but they had to do a lot of cleanup for the rhetoric that Tay was spewing. You also have to look at
things like when Google Photos was categorizing black women as monkeys and how
that perpetuated violence and all of these different studies that have come out that talk about
the lack of performance of AI and the inability to be ethical or to not be biased in the way that it
functions. And when you think about that, then you have to ask yourself, why should we allow people
who aren't trained in ethics to freely have access to something that perpetuates harms like this?
I think that one of the most interesting things about this whole Twitter thread is probably the fact that when I talked about how somebody could upload your nudes, somebody said, you're focused on the wrong thing. That's free nudes for all of us.
What?
And I'm like, and I'm like, what?
And so that was also like one of my really big precautions about bringing this conversation up is like, yeah, there are going to be people who gain education from this.
And then they're the morally unsound who see this as an opportunity and that's inspiration to kind of,
explore what that avenue is and to figure out how they can manipulate it in order to create
these sick images. And I mean, we already see with deep fake the influx in like deep fake porn and that
kind of stuff and how that's been used to blackmail people. And so thinking about how now that
it's on everybody's phones, it becomes really easy for people to violate the terms of use and
there's no filter like I said on this app. I also think that them saying that this is not
acceptable behavior on their app is hilarious. When their app literally,
does it without the consent of users. Like all of the women that have posted talking about how they
didn't consent to being naked and that's what they got back from Linsa. It should be alarming to people.
It should be it should be completely alarming. But instead, there are people who are just missing
it as, well, it's just imagination. It's just AI. And then we're not even going to talk or I mean,
we can talk about the intellectual property rights violations that comes in when we're talking about
how there's so many different artists who would be willing.
to do portraits for people that are accurate and ethical for reasonable prices.
But instead, you can kind of think of Linsa as the fast fashion of self-portraits.
People want fast and accessible without thinking about the implications or the harms.
And so it directly benefits them so they don't think about how it impacts anybody else down the line
or how it will even impact them down the line because immediate gratification is what they're seeking.
Yeah.
I saw somebody tweeting about how when they used the LENSA app,
it generated very realistic imaginings of her breasts.
And she was like, I didn't consent to have my, like, to have this be what's happening.
And, you know, I think even beyond things like nudes, something that I noticed is that the AI really created these very,
these images that adhered very traditionally to sort of like standard beauty practice or beauty
So, like, they lighten skin tones, they slim noses, they make, they make the women, like,
much more sort of traditionally, like, sexualized. And I think, like, what does that tell you about
the limits of AI as it's currently being used? Because I would imagine that if you have, you know,
limitless ability to render things, having it be so, so, having the things that are rendered
adhere to such traditional understandings of the limits of gender, the limits of gender, the
limits of beauty, whatever, these very conventional attitudes, is so disappointing and such a,
such a, it says so, I feel like it might say something about how this technology is being used.
So I think that we should definitely talk about the implicit bias aspect of it. And this is
something that I'm really passionate about is technology holds the bias or algorithms hold the
bias of the programmer. So whoever's training them has the biases that are being reproduced and
regurgitated in these images. So the hypersexualization of women,
And that's because most likely the person training these algorithms is somebody who's looking for hypersexuality.
Like if they are, if they're inputting images of women that look promiscuous, of course it's going to regurgitate that.
Like if they're inputting images of only white women or only Asian women or only women that look a certain way, whenever it's faced with an image that does not look like that, it's going to try to do its best to emulate those images while also trying to stay true, allegedly.
to what the original image looked like.
But most of the time when you see black people who have used it,
their skin is significantly lightened,
or their hair texture has changed,
or a lot of different things.
And so it's not in alignment with people's actual characteristics,
which I think is also really weird,
because why would you want to pay for something
that people have repeatedly told you
doesn't give accurate renderings of yourself
and you're wasting your money?
And I just, I don't get that one either.
But more importantly, I think that
if we're going to talk about how this is regulated and how this app itself perpetuates,
like all of the modern stereotypes of what people look like,
then we have to talk about implicit bias and how it's inherently anti-black and abelist
and anti-trans and a bunch of other things all within like the conversation of what the biases of
these algorithms are. I think that's probably the simplest way to put it, is that this is a
much deeper black hole than just like the Twitter thread. It's so much deeper than that. And it
requires so much more conversation and critical understanding. And I think the other thing is,
people don't believe that reading is fundamental. Like if people picked up a book or or Googled for
five minutes, they could find out all of the information they needed to tell them why this was a bad
idea. But they don't. They see a trend and they hop on the bandwagon and don't think about what it
means for them. And then they act shocked or surprised afterwards like, oh, nobody told me, or they label
people who bring up these conversations as Luddites who are anti-technological development and that
kind of stuff. And I think that that's ridiculous as well, because most of the people who are
critiquing this are people who are in the industry. More after a quick break.
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I'm Timbo.
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We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves,
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Let's get right back into it.
Something that we talk about a lot on the show
are that it really seems to be marginalized people,
in this case, black women
who are doing a lot of the, I don't know,
questioning of technology like AI and the way that it is being used to cause harm,
do you find that to be the case? Like in the field, the people who are sort of asking the
poking questions about ethics in AI, do you find that that tends to be people who are
marginalized or even more specifically like black women? I definitely do. I think that oftentimes
we're expected to be the ones who bear the burden of accountability when it comes to how we
engage with these technologies. I think that in a field like electrical engineering, for example,
there's less than 3% of us in the field. Oftentimes, we are doing the legwork. We are talking
about the anti-blackness. We are talking about the hypersexualization of black women. We are talking
about the miscategorization and the other biases that are present. And I don't think that there's
anybody else that really advocates for these things because it's not a part of their interest,
right? So these are the same people who are programming and developing these algorithms. Of course,
they don't see a flaw in the ways in which they function. And I think that,
But this goes all the way back to just like my senior research when I was in college, when I was
working on my project.
And I had a professor who told me that implicit bias didn't actually exist and that I was creating
a problem in my head.
And then when I provided evidence of this, he tried to gaslight me and told me that it was
made up evidence until all of a sudden he decided it was good research.
And then he said that he was going to publish his own study on this using my research and
my results, which I thought was really wild.
And so I think that oftentimes black women are expected.
it to be like the mules. We're supposed to do all of the heavy work and then somebody else gets
the gratification, somebody else gets the credit. And I think that's true across all different
disciplines in life. It's just like a lot of times black women are the trailblazers, especially
as the most educated or college educated demographic in the nation. We are oftentimes sought out
to provide the knowledge but they're not credited or given the resources in order to expand on
our knowledge sets because we've given people what they want and they've done.
milked us for what we have to offer and then they think that they can discard us.
I think that that's so, I mean, who gets the credit is also who has the power, right?
And so your professor being like, no, no, no, that doesn't exist.
And then when he feels sufficiently like it does exist, oh, now I'm going to write my
own paper about it.
And so that I'll get the credit for pointing out something that I just spent the last
couple weeks gaslighting you about saying doesn't exist.
You know, it's like, that is clearly a push pull about who has.
power, who has legitimacy, and that matters so much in these fields.
It definitely does, especially when you have to lobby for a seat at the table in the first place.
It's like, AI within itself is already something that's, like I said, very biased, and it's not
very inclusionary even in terms of who's developing the algorithms.
And so you have organizations like the Algorithm of League that are working tirelessly,
which was also founded by a black woman.
You have, what else?
You have AJL, you have Black and AI and a whole bunch of other different works that are trying to bring attention to the ethical imbalances that are present within AI and development.
And the work is taken and people celebrate it.
However, oftentimes the people who are behind the work are overlooked.
And I don't think that there's really ever space for conversations around this unless we're creating the conversations ourselves, which is pretty terrible.
and not all that encouraging.
And so I think that now more than ever,
this is when the black women who are in the field
to really have to rally around each other
and rally around our youth in order to develop a wave
of people who are equally as passionate
and equally as qualified to create the ripples in this industry
because nobody else is going to do it
if we're not facilitating the conversations.
A fucking men.
Are there alternatives for folks who might be interested in checking out AI and like AI arts,
but doing so in a way that might be safer or less harmful or might have less ethical implications?
I personally will not list any other apps because I feel that there's risks associated with all of them.
And like everything, I mean, every app that we use has a risk.
But I'm not necessarily here to endorse any AI-based.
art generator, I would encourage people to learn about building algorithms themselves,
learn about how to input something and get an output on your own, as opposed to trusting a system
and handing over your data to somebody else. There's plenty of beginner algorithm development
workshops and different tutorials that you can access online that you can do on your own.
And I encourage people to learn the fundamentals of it actually before trying to get results that they can post on social media.
That's just me personally.
I know that people in the thread did list some of their, like, ideal creation.
I think that AFS, like, Mid Journey, that people are using for a prompt-based image generation
have their own risk and have their own harms.
I also think that if you look at some of the art, it's really creepy.
And you're better off just paying people who paint for real to do these images.
Like some of the, have you seen AI hands and fingers?
They're so creepy.
And they are very creepy.
And so I think that, like I said, people should just explore like the fundamentals of algorithms, understanding layers, understanding outputs, understanding bounding boxes simplistically.
And I think that knowledge about that would, one, make them more intentional when it comes to how they choose to interact with AI.
But then also, give them the skills that they need in order to create the art that they're seeking to create on their own without infringing on the rights of other creatives that are working tirelessly.
to paint real images or to create real digital art without using AI generators. I just think that
there's a way that we can do this that doesn't violate people or there's ways that people can
participate without violating other people. And if you have a genuine interest in learning it,
then I encourage people to seek that out as opposed to trying to hop on the fast ways and using
apps like Lysa or whatever other AI generators are really popular right now. Yeah, I will say about
the, you brought up the intellectual property rights issues. I did see a couple of the lens generated
images where if you looked real close in the bottom corner, you would see a watermark or like a,
like a signature. And so we had this idea that, oh, this is just being generated by a computer
artist robot somewhere. And it's like, no, if it has a signature, they've just lifted this
image from another human artist and maybe changed a little something about it. And now they're
giving it back to you and calling it AI art. Absolutely. And I think that that's another big thing
right now is that a lot of artists are fighting for their rights to their own images after their
artwork has been fed into the AI generators and the generators are producing something that's
a little bit more enhanced. And then people are publishing it and selling it as their own and
the AI, I mean, the original artist isn't getting of their credits and is being robbed of their
IP and their copyright because, well, AI generate 8.
And so they're allowed to evade responsibility for infringing on that person's work.
That's another problem that I think correlates to all of this is that the output images technically don't have owners.
Like, yes, the app owns it, but there's no individual person that gains rights over these images.
And that means that there's no identity associated with who maybe trained the AI to turn people's images into nudes.
or who input somebody's nudes into these images or publish them accordingly.
I think that it allows people to dodge responsibility a lot.
And it violates other people who are actively trying to establish themselves
because they're passionate about real art because people want to participate in a fad
that doesn't really have any net benefit besides fast images.
but I don't understand why people would want images that violate the rights and violate ethics.
How can folks get a better understanding of AI?
I just encourage people to read books.
And if you want to learn more, read, I think that there's so many different studies that are out right now.
So many different people have been screaming at the top of their lungs,
how we have to be cognizant of the ways in which AI is used,
and how we've propagated in society.
And a lot of people have not done the reading
and are mindlessly participating in different social media trends
without understanding how they perpetuate the harms
that they claim that they want to mitigate,
whether it be child pornography or different industries
that infringe upon the rights and the autonomy of other people.
I don't think that people are paying acute attention
to how they are exacerbating these problems.
And so when we facilitate a conversation around that,
And when we are intentional about learning about these things, I think that it creates a more safe interaction with AI.
I won't say it makes AI a safe place because I don't think that that exists at this time.
But it does make our interactions with AI a little bit safer.
Well, I'm so glad that you're out there like poking everyone to be a little bit more informed than asking the questions to make this very, very powerful technology a little bit more ethical.
Is there a place where folks can follow all the work that you're up to?
So I have a tech Instagram that I'll be posting kind of like this thread and continue this conversation on.
It's called Polyphalogy P-O-L-Y-F-A-C-O-G-Y.
Sorry, I can't spell.
And then my regular at is at Melanin-E-L-E-L-A-N-E-E-N-I-N.
E-L-E-V-A-T-I-N-E.
Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?
You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com.
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We do some retirement homes.
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