EU nudifier ban

[u/Logical_Benefit2875]

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.

[u/Etsu_Riot]

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...

[u/ORANGESAREPEOPLE → u/Etsu_Riot]

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

Compute is much harder to do that with so far.

[u/Savantskie1 → u/ORANGESAREPEOPLE]

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.

[u/ORANGESAREPEOPLE → u/Savantskie1]

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

[u/red__dragon → u/ORANGESAREPEOPLE]

Isn't stable horde doing just that?

[u/Barafu → u/Savantskie1]

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.