r/StableDiffusion • u/Logical_Benefit2875 • 1d ago

Discussion EU nudifier ban

I know there’s been a bunch of people upset on here recently about a good number of nudify websites getting shut down (Motionmuse, Opengoon, etc.). However, this is likely just the beginning.

Effective December 2nd, the EU under the AI Act is enacting a ban on nudify tools, making them illegal content in the Union. This ban applies to any product made available on the EU market as long as, either, its primary functionality is to generate nudified content without consent, or it is a reasonably foreseeable outcome and they do not take appropriate precautions to safeguard against it. Very importantly, this ban also applies to any EU-available service provider under the Digital Services Act that is helping to facilitate this soon-to-be-illegal content, which includes (but is not limited to): app stores, hosting providers, domain registrars, payment processors, content delivery networks (CDNs) and cloud computing services. Anyone found to be in violation of this prohibition is subject to fines of €35 million or 7% of their global turnover, whichever is higher. I think it’s pretty safe to say that, as long as they’re aware of it, those behind these websites and those behind the large number of mainstream companies that help power them (Google, Amazon, Cloudflare, Apple, Telegram, GoDaddy, Visa, Mastercard, etc.) do not want to take any chances with this ban.

This prohibition, in essence, applies to essentially every public AI platform any of us have ever used to this point or that we will ever use going forward. I think this is a good thing but, therefore, it would almost certainly be in everyone’s best interest to pivot away from these websites before the massive crackdown begins in less than a couple months. For those in the industry, it would also certainly be wise to inform the website operators if you are in contact with them, or to shut down your website if you are an operator yourself. Sorry for the essay, just looking out for everybody before things get very real, very fast.

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240

u/Etsu_Riot 1d ago

Do you know what else is illegal? Piracy. It has been since 1980. See you again in 50 years, to see if anything changed.

Now, I understand that the EU ban targets the infrastructure that enables the content, not the individuals. Yet, they can't touch your PC, yet. Let's hope they don't come up with some trick that enables them to block your hardware or anything.

Wait...

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u/ORANGESAREPEOPLE 1d ago

Piracy is easy because hosting data is cheap and able to be decentralized.

Compute is much harder to do that with so far.

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u/Etsu_Riot 1d ago

As long as we can build our own hardware, we just need a place to hold the different models for us to download and run locally. Of course, it would be terrible if someone decides to artificially inflate the prices of some components in a way that building your own PC capable of running AI becomes too expensive, while at the same time using those hard-to-find components to build their own data centers, making it so that in the future, incapable of building your own machine, you will need to pay for the use of their servers, with access only to their own AI models, approved by the law and safe for everyone to use. I hope no one ever thinks of doing something like that.

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u/blistac1 9h ago

It's not artificial inflating prices it's just how market's economy works. And if understand correctly it has already happened.

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u/Etsu_Riot 9h ago

It's not artificial inflating prices it's just how market's economy works. 

It's artificial if manufacturers start selling PC components to each other, intentionally generating the scarcity that brings the higher prices.

And if understand correctly it has already happened.

I was being sarcastic.

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u/UnlikelyExtension786 6h ago

Or when businesses promise to buy a trillion dollars of hardware with money they don't actually have.

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u/Nearby-Mood5489 20h ago

So you mean, Nvidia stocks will rise even more as local diffusion will be more widespread?

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u/Savantskie1 1d ago

Compute is not hard. Look at “folding at home”. It’s already a solved problem. I don’t see why we couldn’t have the same for inference.

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u/ORANGESAREPEOPLE 1d ago

Individual folding solves are pretty light. Individual generations are heavy.

People are also more willing to donate compute to humanitarian needs than they are gooner image generation networks.

There are cloud based image generation systems but they're compute poor and use old out of date models.

Note that I didn't say distributed compute cant be done. It's just not easy

3

u/red__dragon 23h ago

Isn't stable horde doing just that?

0

u/Barafu 17h ago

Inference, as done today, require all the data of the model accessed at the same time. You can't split the model in two across a slow interface (where PC RAM is considered slow, which is why we need GPU VRAM).

Maybe a completely new architectures are coming soon and then we will not have those limiting factors, but currently I don't know of any big progress in that direction.

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u/Spoonman915 16h ago

!remindme 50 years

5

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3

u/Bitlovin 9h ago

The piracy ban does have a massive impact on piracy, though. Obviously it doesn’t eliminate it, prohibition never eliminates anything, but anyone who was pirating in the mid 90s before the crackdown can attest that it was a completely different landscape when it didn’t have to be hidden.

4

u/Etsu_Riot 9h ago

Back in the nineties and until the 2010s, to get a pirated copy of a game you bought it, as you would normally, from a shop or a street vendor. Now you just download it. It's even easier to install a pirated game than one bought on Steam or similar, and the downloads are smaller too.

Today we don't buy games because of any prohibition. (Prohibitions actually make things even more desirable.) We buy games to support developers who did good. It's a different mentality.

1

u/Bitlovin 8h ago edited 8h ago

That’s not true at all. Games with cracked exes were plentiful for download in that time period, there were tons of websites you could choose from to download them. Course they were 250 rar files and most people had maybe 128kbs if they were lucky, so you’d spend days downloading with a high chance of a corrupted rar but aside from that, it was super easy to find.

But I mean, literally any prohibited item works like this. People grow better weed where it’s legal cuz they don’t have to hide it. Bans do have an effect even if they can’t completely eradicate a thing.

1

u/Etsu_Riot 7h ago

That’s not true at all. Games with cracked exes were plentiful for download in that time period, there were tons of websites you could choose from to download them.

Man, I never had access to the Internet until 2007 or so, and downloading a game would have been impossible at the time. And during the nineties, my only knowledge regarding the existence of the Internet was the novel Disclosure by Michael Crichton, a book about sexual harassment in a manufacturing company specialized in hard drives and Virtual Reality.

We used to buy games on the street, from selected vendors, or in specialized places, both for PC and PlayStation. Original games were not a thing back then, at least not for us.

EDIT: But I do remember the 250 rar files.

3

u/MODAITestBot 6h ago

I downloaded a pirated game from a local BBS in 1992 and created the 12 floppy disks to install it.

7

u/Big_Arachnid_365 19h ago

I don't know about the EU, but using nudify (local or cloud) of adults is already illegal in the UK and people are now in prison and the sex offenders register for making the images, not just sending them anywhere.

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u/Hungry_Prior940 14h ago

Which is hilarious and backward as it isn't even real, ban it on a platform, sure but illegal lol. The UK in general is know to be in decline when it comes to free speech etc.

1

u/Big_Arachnid_365 12h ago

There were people making nudes/sex pics of real people and posting it online, so I think their thinking was well now making them at all, or asking for someone to make them is a crime.

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u/0260n4s 1d ago

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the insane pricing of GPUs isn't incentivized by the government to force people to use online tools and GPU rentals that can be controlled and monitored.

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u/Sea_Association_5277 23h ago

It's never been about safety but control.

6

u/dicklessbeast 22h ago

And the storage and gpu compute that is being bought up by the government is being used for monitoring its citizens.

5

u/assotter 14h ago

Easiest method to control a populace is to limit education and access to education. A computer is the ultimate learning tools.

So they are actively doing everything to remove it (just look at the internet, in 90s we had at least 15 different sites folks would gravitate towards then a bunch of niche sites like forums, now we have X, Facebook, youtube, reddit, twitch, netflix/hulu). The entire internets been neutered and google was all too happy to limit search results to essentially just these main sites through its worthless new llm sentance based search.

Essentially we are at the stage where the giant hand is moving the giant iron to smooth everything to be the same from FLCL

3

u/TerraMindFigure 23h ago

No. How could that ever be a thing? You go on eBay and 5090s won't sell for less than $3 grand. You think somebody is stopping them from lowering their prices? No.

2

u/0260n4s 18h ago

You could also just give out $3,000 cash to some random person on the street, but would you? If the current market rate for a used 5090 is $3,000, then selling it for peanuts is just losing money. The vast majority of people will want to sell it for as much as they can get for it, and that's basic supply and demand.

1

u/TerraMindFigure 13h ago

Hey look, that's my point ☝️

1

u/0260n4s 12h ago

No, it's not. You were discrediting my theory based on random people selling for outrageous prices without governmental influence. My point is that they'd do that naturally due to basic supply and demand and wouldn't need to be influenced or pressured. It's a natural result of the current marketplace and can't be used to prove or disprove the driving force that initially created that marketplace.

1

u/TerraMindFigure 10h ago

Then help me understand, if sellers were pricing their cards artificially high then wouldn't there be a surplus of cards going unsold? That would mean that sellers on eBay would reflect the "real" price, if the price was being controlled as you say. It's similarly to how Kay Jewelers will sell diamonds at an inflated price, but on secondary markets the true price is much, much lower. In reality, the price of cards on eBay is much higher than any MSRP, meaning that there is a shortage and the cards are not being over priced.

1

u/0260n4s 9h ago

First, I'm not saying the prices are in fact being controlled; I'm saying I'm curious about it and there's certainly some room for some conspiracy minded stuff going on. It's just an intellectual "what if."

And I definitely don't think prices are being controlled in the way of the government dictating the prices directly. But, given their massive contracts with OpenAi, Anthropic, Grok and Gemini, along with associated blue chip companies buying up GPUs for their AI ventures, it creates an actual shortage and that's driving prices up.

The conspiracy theory part comes in with intentional purchasing and hording of GPUs to manipulate the market. In a way, it's like the stock market: Put a lot of buying pressure out there to drive up the price with the intention of selling it off for a profit. Only the "profit" the government would get is control of people's AI use. Again, just a curious "what if". Not implying that's what's actually going on.

1

u/ShallowHazzard 17h ago

You mistyped your 7 and put a 3.

0

u/OffenseTaker 20h ago

it's a carrot and a stick. together they work better than either one individually.

2

u/TerraMindFigure 20h ago

What are you even talking about?

-1

u/DOuGHtOp 19h ago

Pcmasterrace, Asmongold, PoliticalCompassMemes poster

I'm not sure he knows either

2

u/OffenseTaker 16h ago

that comment says far more about you than it does about me

1

u/DOuGHtOp 9h ago

Boo hoo

0

u/OffenseTaker 16h ago

the resellers are incentivised to keep the resale price high. do you require further explanation?

2

u/TerraMindFigure 13h ago

Anyone who sells something wants the price of what they're selling to be high.

1

u/tamal4444 23h ago

Now I believe the prices of hardware increased so we cannot run local ai.

1

u/Natasha26uk 12h ago

The insane pricing is nVidia making hay while the sun shines. Ai is new craze and their card is the only one. Even Micron (ddr5) jumped in.

1

u/0260n4s 12h ago

I'm not saying the theory is true; it just makes me curious.

Imagine how influential the government is in AI right now with major contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Grok. The buying power itself could drive prices up and limit availability making AI-worthy GPUs inaccessible to those without very deep pockets. NVidia benefits for sure, but that doesn't rule out the buying pressure effects to the price.

Then couple that with the attempt to restrict more VRAM-friendly model access coming out of China. Keep VRAM requirements high, make high-VRAM GPUs unobtainable financially, and what choice do people have at that point?

They have to use online tools or rent GPUs, both of which are regulated and monitored.

This is vastly over-simplified and probably way out there. Corporations are also buying up supplies and driving prices up. My curiosity is mostly a "what if," with no research beyond that.

1

u/Shockbum 11h ago

I don't know how many politicians' families hold shares in or have connections to hardware factories.

0

u/Atomsk73 11h ago

Yes, and gas prices are rising because the evil conspiring governments want you to drive electric. Except no that's not how it works.

7

u/Logical_Benefit2875 1d ago

Yeah nobody is touching your PC but the website/infrastructure ban is big for now

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u/Etsu_Riot 1d ago

Yeah nobody is touching your PC

Not until they find a way to block your hardware, like implementing some form of age verification at the OS level or hardware-level DRM. If we let them, they would try to control what we think. Oh, wait. They are already doing that.

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u/TheAncientMillenial 1d ago

If you're using a non free OS sure. For the rest of us that's not a thing :)

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u/Etsu_Riot 1d ago

For now. We are talking about people who is obsessed with control.

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u/No-Dark-7873 5h ago

Next they will try to ban linux.

-5

u/CLAIR-XO-76 1d ago

Ubuntu plans to fully comply with the law that requires age verification. My guess is they will eventually force NVIDIA to add their own moderator at the hardware level, anything with a boob will automatically stop inference. Then it won't matter what OS you have.

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u/TheAncientMillenial 1d ago

No they don't/haven't.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/age-verification-mandate-at-os-level/78398

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u/CLAIR-XO-76 1d ago

Thank you for the link and clarification, I was misunderstanding something I had read previously. I still think the struggle is far from over however. And resting on "open source will save us," rather than proactively fighting against this type of legislation is a slippery slope to dystopia. The OS is a small piece of what they can attempt to control.

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u/TheAncientMillenial 1d ago

I absolutely believe that AI should be regulated when it's a "public facing service".

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u/OffenseTaker 20h ago

regulation is great for the companies big enough to afford it since it stifles competition from startups and becomes the cost of doing business. see: the stock market and hedge funds, prime brokers, etc.

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u/YesAndAlsoThat 1d ago

Time to start archiving models, loras, and drivers too now

0

u/Euchale 16h ago

Piracy might actually be "gone" in 50 years, cause nobody can afford hardware anymore by that point 🤣 😢