Ridiculousness has reached another level that none of us could have ever predicted when Facebook was established in 2005 or before any popular social media platform that exists today. The AI selfie-generating mania has hit many popular social media platforms (particularly dating platforms), where users can create fake profile images that make them look better and more attractive.
This technology is still in its infant years, and many more controversies and interesting questions are bound to arise regarding the morality and legality of these applications. It’s all too blurry, and one could deduce that technology is moving too fast for us to keep up and control it.
AI has considerably impacted the online casino industry, where it’s used for good by enhancing graphics and players’ online experience. For instance, gamers heading to the 32Red play bonanza slot online may have some questions about registering their details and creating an account. For such questions, companies and customers find it much easier to use a chatbot as an intermediary. It gives the information necessary in a much quicker fashion than it would take a human employee to respond via phone or email.
Its use, then, has tangible rewards and benefits. However, for its use in developing fake selfies, should a line be drawn?
How Does It Work
A programme known as PhotoAI will take 12 to 20 of your passable, poorly taken, and badly lit selfies and generate a bunch of mock-up photos of yourself tailored to a platform or style of your choice. The Tinder photo AI package will make you look fabulous by beefing up your guns or sharpening your cheekbones. There’s even a LinkedIn package that’ll generate photos of you dressed in business attire or a suit.
The Tinder package promises a response from admirers within 12 hours. Other options can generate memes for your selfies and create stylish portraits that resemble popular painting styles of artists. According to the operator, your fake portrait will be deleted after seven days. Guess that’s as long as your fake photo will last until your admirer meets you in person. So that makes sense, right?
The creator of this app (Sebastien Lhomme) explains that PhotoAI first fine-tunes your selfies by filtering images. Then the image is sent through a second filter that applies your chosen style. Finally, the image goes through Stable Diffusion (a text-to-image diffusion open-source model). Images are simply fed through this pre-existing image generator.
Controversies
With the apparent controversies and absurdities aside, there have been some controversies. In their professional capacity, some artists have protested that their art styles have been used without permission. So as much fun fake selfies and modifying them may be for some, the legality and morality of using them are still unclear.
Additionally, it’s not 100% clear whether users employing AI technology to make themselves look irresistible violates the terms and conditions of dating applications. Aren’t there certain rules somewhere that state that users aren’t allowed to misrepresent themselves? It doesn’t seem to matter much since there’s nothing stopping a malicious person from catfishing an unsuspecting victim on any social platform.
The creator unequivocally states that he’s not responsible for how users use the photos that the application generates. He has pointed out that even without the help of PhotoAI, people have been using Photoshop and hiring freelance photographers that nip and tuck their photos.
The service does state in its terms of service that users aren’t allowed to upload images of other people or upload pornography or naked photos. In reality, there’s no way of regulating this in the real world. There have been advancements made in OpenAI that can filter and reject certain images. However, devoted users of Stable Diffusion have generated some questionable images.
What’s Next
Collaboration between developers and significant other parties will have to occur at some point. At the moment, it appears that users are responsible for the ethical use of this technology and their personal moral barometres to guide them.