Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, was an early investor in tech giants like Facebook and Lyft. Its decision to invest in the generative AI platform Civitai is pushing ethical boundaries.
Civitai is an open source platform where Stable Diffusion enthusiasts can share their AI-generated art and other resources. Some of those resources are also being used to create nonconsensual porn.
Stable Diffusion is pretty good straight out of the box, but you can make it even better by fine-tuning the model. LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) is a technique for fine-tuning diffusion models like Stable Diffusion to get very good at generating a specific type of image.
Using a LoRA trains Stable Diffusion on new concepts, such as specific characters, art styles, or visual aesthetics.
If you’re looking for a specific LoRA then Civitai is a great resource. But even though the platform’s Ts and Cs expressly prohibit the hosting of “mature” content, there are plenty of LoRAs hosted on the site that can enable you to make your own NSFW pics at home.
10/ CivitAi is littered with the non-consensual likeness use of celebrities, politicians and people.
At what point do we hold companies like CivitAI accountable for all this harm? Do we also get to hold companies like @a16z responsible for investing knowing the harms? pic.twitter.com/BxMUx9JPC8
— Karla Ortiz (@kortizart) November 15, 2023
Bounties
Civitai’s new “Bounties” option allows users to ask the Civitai community to make a custom LoRA and then rewards the best one with Civitai’s virtual currency.
This option has led to a lot of users requesting models to generate images of celebrities, influencers, or even private individuals, often without clothing or engaged in sexual acts.
A bounty for at least one private person was reportedly found by 404 Media. The person requesting the model said the picture was of his wife, but further investigation led to the woman’s Facebook account which said she was single.
A number of developers declined the bounty, but one user did eventually create the AI model which is now available for anyone to download on Civitai.
It’s not all bad
Like a lot of online platforms, most of the content on Civitai is harmless, but its open source community approach is vulnerable to misuse by a growing minority of users.
Civitai has around 3 million users, of which around 10,000 unique creators upload new models. Civitai says that bounties asking for the likeness of real people only represent 10% of requests.
And there’s a good argument for creating these kinds of AI models. Civitai CEO Justin Maier says that he sees an opportunity for people to license and sell their likenesses to brands to use in advertising.
A fashion model, for example, would normally only be able to do one shoot at a time. Licensing and selling her likeness to a clothing company could scale her earning potential without having to get in front of the camera again.
Andreessen Horowitz Partner Brian Kim, said in a statement, “Our investment in the company will only supercharge something that’s already working incredibly well, by contributing to a world where any individual can take advantage of what the biggest technological shift of our generation – AI – has to offer.”
The problem is that some of those individuals are using AI in an extremely harmful way. Supercharging Civitai with a16z cash certainly isn’t going to stop this.
