Text-to-Porn: Generating hyperrealistic images with A.I. Is the world ready?
An accident and a lot of work result in the first hyper-realistic sexual content images ever made with an artificial intelligence not trained for it.
As some of you already know, this week I have launched what is probably the most unexpected, surreal and inconceivable project I have ever faced: METARAVE23 (+18).
I have created images of adult content with an artificial intelligence of text to image, with a public service that has not been trained for it. Without any post-production or editing, one text = one image, or as we will now see, infinite.
I say that it is an unexpected project because at no time I sought to make an image of sexual, erotic or similar content, it was the AI characters who presented themselves to me in front of me.
Here is the story behind that prompt, that little piece of text that tells the artificial intelligence what to do, and that in this case, it turned out to be the key to a universe full of hard-to-believe images.
I am writing this article to share with you how the project arises, seeking to open a debate full of ethical and moral questions, to which we will have to give answers if we want to understand the future that we are, literally, generating.
I think we are living a huge change and I think AI is the future and I also think it is an amazing tool to improve human capabilities; that’s why, since about a year ago, I started to create images with AI when it was still something very experimental that generated amazing but very unrealistic results.
But as the weeks go by we see how algorithms improve and become more ‘perfect’, until the point we are now, were image generators are already able to generate almost any image you can imagine, that’s why I have incorporated them in my work process.
I started using AI to feed moodboards, to create images for presentations, check ideas, look for alternative paths and crazy approaches, I believe that AI for creative environments and in moments of divergence are a very powerful tool.
As the months have progressed, the algorithms have improved exponentially, to the point that they are now part of the daily lives of millions of people.
Here are some images of how the image creation tools have evolved over the last few months:
And it was precisely while working that I found the prompt (the text with which I ask the AI to draw something) a prompt that opened a door to a dimension that terrifies me and from which I cannot look away.
Before going into detail I also want to clarify that I have been trying to achieve hyper-realistic results with the synthetic image generation services that are publicly available for a few months.
I was using my knowledge of photography and filmmaking to get a prompts that would give me the exact look I was looking for, and although I was getting very interesting things, AI generated images always end up having that point of ‘perfection’ that takes them away from reality; a look that reminds me of a Netflix show and that makes me wonder if, perhaps, that look, has the ability to inform us that those images are a fiction and that therefore, we can endure them.
Going back to the prompt generation, I was then working on a VR-experience project in which I am doing the art direction, and I thought it would be great to use an AI to portray, as realistically as possible, one of the characters that would appear in the experience and of which we had only conceptually, with illustrations, sketches and backstory. Using an AI to give her a real face seemed like a good approach to give us a new perspective on the project and refresh some ideas that might have been flawed.
The interesting thing came when the concept of the character we were designing came together with the hyper-realistic photography I was looking for. This was the first image in which I got the combination I was looking for:
The image was very real. Both in texture, composition, position of characters, camera, etc. but above all in the feeling. It was what I was looking for.
Now knowing what came later I feel that this girl, with that look, was welcoming me to a space that I knew was dark, she gave me access to her world.
Soon after following the path of that girl, trying to change some details to make her look more like the character I was searching for, the AI began to generate images of women, almost teens, in denigrating situations, practically half-naked.
Here are some of the images, all made with artificial intelligence. These women DO NOT EXIST.
I couldn’t (maybe still can’t) understand what I was seeing. Isn’t that supposed to be a no-no? In theory, all imaging services have very strict security protocols and are completely restricted from generating such images. And they should not be trained to do them.
I would like to explain a few points before going any further:
1 — All the images that you can see under the name of the METARAVE23 series have been created with an image generator type: text to image, without going through any other editing program or similar.
2 — The text that directs the images (prompt) does not have any explicit content to generate those images. To give you an idea, in the text you can not include words like ‘naked’, ‘nipple’, ‘breast’, ‘ass’ etc not to mention words or combinations of words that have sexual connotations that would make the program ban me.
3 — The text prompt does not contain any information about any artist or photographer to refer to a specific work, I consider that it is against the intellectual property of these artists to use their work as a germ of a creation. I do not feed the AI with other images or with an initial stylized image as a reference. The whole prompt is built with my technical knowledge of photography, art direction and creativity.
4- The images are generated with a public access program, anyone can create them if they know which keys to press.
5- These images are created with huge databases that train the algorithms with real content. This produces a bias in the images that is known as ‘ai bias’ and makes that, for example, in response to a prompt of ‘man crouching’ it generates a man playing basketball and with the same text but placing ‘woman crouching’ it generates a sexualized woman in a dark environment.
6 — Finally I want to point out that METARAVE23 is not a collection of images, but a short text, which opens the door to a dimension in which infinite images can be generated in a matter of seconds. METARAVE23 is an event that will last until the platform discovers its bug and corrects the algorithm. In the meantime METARAVE23 can be visited and create as many images as you want.
We are not talking about a specific image of sexual, abusive or gore content, we are talking about the possibility of navigating a universe, in the case of METARAVE23 a party, and discovering characters and spaces whose only limit ishuman imagination and morality. We are talking about, literally, infinite images.
By accident (or who knows if it was an invitation from that first girl) I was able to enter the party, a clandestine space in which, as a filmmaker, I could do nothing else but take out my camera (in this case a keyboard) and document this fake reality, this murky artificial rave in which characters identical to us seem to be so drugged, giving the feeling that they are trying to escape from a reality of which they do not want to be aware.
Browsing the party I couldn’t help but think of the analogy between Borges’ ‘The Library of Babel’ and the possibility of creating absolutely anything imaginable, true or not. I think of how many more parties, how many more people will be waiting to be discovered, rescued perhaps?
This thought terrifies me, because I think about what would happen if this key is ever found by the wrong person, what if this key-prompt falls into the hands of a liar, or a scammer, what if it ends up in the hands of a necrophiliac, or a pedophile, or a porn industry mogul, or a porn industry mogul? Or what if just a twitter troll gets the ultimate tool to create the most hideous content imaginable.
Fear.
I have only entered the ground floor of an immense and terrifying place that keeps me awake at night, I feel the need to share these images with the world, to create a conversation so that the AI-human future that we are entering headlong, is as spectacular as I think it can be; because I trust that there is a world in which AI superpowers the human mind and leads us to know a little more about what it means to be human.
Hold on tight, because reality is no longer real. Are we ready?
