You can kind of think of Lindsa as the fast fashion of self portraits. There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production of I Heart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is there are No Girls on the Internet. So it's your social media feeds are anything like mine, that you probably have been seeing these
AI images of your friends all over Facebook. And it really reminded me of a few other early Facebook picture trends, like when we all picked cartoon characters or famous actors that we thought we looked like, and I'll changed our profile pictures to reflect that. I'm probably dating myself a little bit here, but early Facebook was full of earnest stuff like that, and this AI image generation trend kind of seems like a call back to those days. So at first I was confused, but then I started to
get intrigued. I mean, who doesn't want to see a representationation of themselves reimagined and an otherworldly, futuristic, cyberpunk aesthetic. So I tracked down where they were all coming from and found lens Us, the app behind these viral images. So there I was finding myself happily clicking around the app and scrolling around looking for the ten to twenty pictures of myself that they said they needed to generate AI images. And it wasn't until I was prompted to
grab my credit card that I pumped the brakes. First of all, isn't it funny how easy it is, at least for me to set aside the inclination to ask questions if everyone else is doing something on social media and it looks kind of fun or cool. I am embarrassed about how quickly I went from this is stupid too, I should probably try it? And I feel like this is exactly the feeling that tech companies are so good
at exploiting in all of us. So what exactly are the ethical and privacy implications of using an AI image generation apps like lens up Engineer and AI ethicis Azaria Cole Shephard wrote a popular Twitter thread break it all down, starting with the tweet I am here on my soapbox to ruin your day by talking about why you should delete length to AI and stop blindly using image based AI generator apps. Hi, my name is Azariah Coole Ship,
but I don't really have a fancy title. I had just graduated with my degree in electrical engineering with the emphasis and AI and implicit advice. You're an electrical engineer, you're a real passion for ethics and AI, UH and implicit bias and a I. How did this become something that you were interested in pursuing professionally and really thinking about.
Early in my college career, I became really really interested in AI, and we talked about like brave, Brave New World and all of the different robotic developments and stuff in some of my classes, and I started to write essays criticizing basically how technology perpetuates violences against certain communities, how lack of regulation also perpetuated by violence, and so
on and so forth. And so when it came time to pick my senior research project as well as my elect is, all of them were centered around algorithmic development and addressing implicit bias and AI and also making a more accessible if it's going to be used despite the fact that it has extreme and what I feel at
this point in time, very irreparable flaws. What first went through your mind when you wake up in the morning and you see all these people on social media have fed their images to this app where they are getting these AI generated cartoon renderings of themselves like what were you? Like? Hate to be a debut downer, guys, But this has
some issues. So it was kind of multifaceted because one, like I said, a lot of my research is about addressing implicit bias and so like increasing access to images of diverse groups in order to enhance the ways in which people engage with facial recognition technology and that kind of stuff, to increase accuracy, to decrease frimalization and so
on and so forth. However, um, I think that there, like I said, there's a lack of regulation as is, and so I don't even think that AI is in a place where it should be allowed to function the way that it does. And so when I saw people using the app, at first I was kind of like, Okay, this is kind of crazy, very trendy. I asked somebody, I was like, what app did you use? They told me, and I just kind of said okay and left it there.
And then over the course the next couple of days, I just started doing research and like really digging into what people were actually branding. And I belonged to a couple of different AI development groups, even the AI art development group where people are generating art using prompts, and I think that that's very different than using your photos
to generate images on apps like this one. And so as a result, um, I started talking about it on like my close friends on Instagram, and I was just like, this is pretty crazy. I think that people just stop using this app, y'all, do me a favorite, don't use it. And people are like, oh, what happened? And like some people ask questions, and so I started like expanding on my opinion and explaining my findings to people, and I kind of turned into, oh, where can I repost this?
So then I went to Twitter and I posted on Twitter and yeah, that's how we got here. And I still think that it's very chaotic. Um, there's a lot of people who are mad or this Twitter thread, and I don't even think it's that deep. I think it's literally just me sharing information that you can find doing basic research and if you decide to google things, like people oftentimes jump on the bandwagon and don't do any reading.
And I feel like thirty minutes of reading in this case, which takes people so for so far or so much further than they are because they've taken different face value.
Most people who are interacting with this tweet didn't even read the terms of service, and so that creates a whole another question as to how seriously people take their data privacy and how people interact with different apps on social media, and which one for different apps and which ones are worth engaging in and which ones aren't versus what's returning an investment or is there returning investment overall when you're using these apps? Oh god, that's such an
interesting point. Like, I first of all, we are big proponents of reading those terms terms and service. If they are if they if they are difficult for you know, your average person to understand, if they're not a lawyer, there might be like might there be some reason for that? You know? And also, I think your point about return
on an investment, I have this theory. This is just my opinion that when everybody is posting something on social media, apps like Lensa are banking on people wanting the return of investment, being like being able to be part of that, being able to do what their friends are doing, and
like being part of the trend. And so I think even the inclination to just stop and be like is this it is being is doing what everybody else is doing on social media and wanting to be part of the you know, part of the trend, which I understand, Like I get caught up in that too. Is that
worth the potential risk for what I'm doing? And like, I think that things move so quickly on the Internet that we really have created a situation where we're inviting people to not take that minute to actually think about if the return is going to be worth it. I definitely agree. I don't think that people take time to contemplate that at all. And I think that that was Like one of the biggest questions that I got throughout the day today was like, well, you use apps like
Twitter and Instagram. It's like me, using these apps is not an endorsement of these apps, it's not an endorsement of their politics, it's not an endorsement of their owners, so on and so forth. However, I can say we
use apps like Twitter and Instagram to communicate. When you're looking at apps like Linsa and you look at the fact that people are just data dumping, basically just dumping their faces in here, paying somebody to process them and then regurgitate an image that's either stealing from an artist that actually painted whatever the images, or is using it to basically broaden and train their AI and as a result eventually sexualized or violate the person whose images it is.
I just think that the returnal investment is very different. Like, I don't see what the purpose of paying somebody to violate you or to take your intelectric property is personally, And I know that we give up plenty of information by being on like I said, these other apps, So this is not an endorsement of them at all, but I think that if you're going to use something, at least have a reason besides it looked cool. Yeah, So what are some of the ethical issues involving using apps
like lensa to do this kind of AI generation? Um? So, some of the biggest things that I noticed, like particularly, were one the fact that when we're talking about in the world of like me too, or in the world of protecting ourselves against sexual assault and violation and that kind of stuff, the conversation around revenge point is a
really important one in this case. When you think about the lack of legislation around a I think about how somebody can upload any image because there's no filter on there that says, hey, you can't upload this. Um. It makes it easy for AI renderings of naked bodies to happen, and somebody could absolutely use that to blackmail or harass somebody who they've been involved with in the past. And I mean, this isn't something that's new. People will do
this with deep fick technology already. And so when you think about an app that's readily available at everybody's finger tips that doesn't require you to have special knowledge like deep fike does, UM, you think about the danger that that perpetuates in the door that that opens for people to be violated and to be exposing with if they didn't consent to And so I think consent is a
really big portion of this. Also, the sexualization of people's images at the hands of LINDSA itself, like the fact that people can submit headshots and it returned images with boobs or with no shirt on, or that kind of assumes somebody's proportions or whatever the case may be, creates a whole different problem because nobody consents to do that, and since that's the property of LINDSA based on their terms and conditions, those images can be misused however they
see fit and so we think about how this infringes on people's personal autonomy, and we discourage people from using this because people talk a lot about agency, all without reading into how they're stripping themselves of their agency when they participate in different trends that our present online. Another thing is like when you look at the augmentation of faces and so on and so forth, it will create a lot of insecurity and so some people I had
saw it throat. I was talking about how some people felt insecure about the results that they got from this app in both directions. Some felt that it overly enhances their beauty and they couldn't match it, and others feel like it made them ugly. Body dysphoria and body dysmorphia may increase as well, because also there's no way for this app to know your gender, and so what happens if somebody's gender fluid and they get misgendered using the app.
A lot of these different violences that people talk about they want to mitigate, they've opened the door for AI to perpetuate them, which creates a whole different problem that I don't think a lot of people to the time
to contemplate or think about. Yeah, I was reading a piece and Wired by Olivia Snow who wrote really compellingly about the fact that apps like Lensa essentially made a sexualized image of her as a child, and sort of like the kind of problems they're in that that an app would do that definitely, Um, I think that that was the other thing that was really alarming to me is when you look in like their terms of conditions or their terms of conditions and their terms of service,
it talks about how you shouldn't upload images of miners because there's risk of them being sexualized. And I think that's really interesting because why is your algorithm program to do this? What kind of training did you give your algorithm where it sees a child's face and automatically sexualizes the image. Additionally, um, why does the protections for sexualization stop at miners? Why is that where your concern is? And I think that that's also something that should be
really alarming for people. Let's take a quick break at her. Back back in Microsoft introduced an AI chat thought called Ta to Twitter. Kay's engineers trained Tay to have a basic grasp of the English language. It was meant to learn from the Internet, and eventually the plan was for TAY to sound like the Internet, using quick memes and jokes and Internet references, to be, as Microsoft said, the
AI with zero chill. But just a short sixteen hours after TAY was introduced to Twitter, k started tweeting inflammatory things like, according to the Engineering and Tech magazine I e. E. Spectrum, I fucking hate feminist and they should all die in Burnen Hell or Bush did nine eleven and Hitler would have done a better job. Azaria says that this is a good example of what happens when everybody can have
access as to certain AI tools. You mentioned early on that you actually don't feel like certain AI technologies are in a place where just anybody should be able to be able to play with them like this necessarily. Do
I have that right? That's correct. I mean you can look back at just the stability of AI itself all the way back to Microsoft's Ta and how TA got on Twitter and went on a racist and homophobic rant without prompting and was like using slurs and able ism and a whole bunch of other things several years ago, and there was no way to check that, And I mean they had to pull it, but they had to do a lot of clean up for the rhetoric that
was spewing. You also have to look at things like when Google Photos was categorizing black women as monkeys and how that perpetuated violence, and all of these different studies that have come out that talk about the lack of performance of AI and the inability to be ethical or to not be biased in the way that it functions. And when you think about that, then you have to ask yourself, why should we allow people who aren't trained in ethics to freely have access to something that perpetuates
harms like this. I think that one of the most interesting things about this whole Twitter threat is probably the fact that when I talked about how somebody could upload your nudes, somebody said, you're focused on the wrong thing.
That's free nudes for all of us, and I like, and I'm like what, And so that was also like one of my really big precautions about bringing this conversation up is like, Yeah, there are going to be people who gain education from this, and then they're the morally unsound who see this as an opportunity and as inspiration to kind of explore what that avenue is and to figure out how they can manipulate it in order to
create these sick images. And I mean we already see with deep fake the influx and like deep fake porn and that kind of stuff, and how that's been used to blackmail people, and so thinking about how now that it's on everybody's phones, it becomes really easy for people to violate the terms of use and there's no filter,
like I said, on this app. I also think that them saying that this is not acceptable behavior on their app is hilarious when their app literally does it without without the consent of users, Like all of the women that are posted talking about how they didn't consent to being naked and that's what they got back from LINDSA
should be alarming to people. It should be it should be completely alarming, But instead there are people who are dismissing it as what's just imagination, is just a I and then we're not even going to talk or I mean, we can't talk about the intellectual property right violations that comes in when we're talking about how there's so many different artists who would be willing to do portraits for
people that are accurate and ethical for reasonable prices. But instead you can kind of think of LINDSA as the fast fashion of self portraits. People want fast and accessible without thinking about the implications of the harms, and so it directly benefits them, So don't they don't think about how it impacts anybody else down the line, or how to even impact them down the line, because immediate gratification
is what they're seeking. Yeah, one I saw somebody tweeting about how when they used the lensa app it generated very realistic imaginings of her breasts and she was like, I didn't consent to have my like to have this be like what's happening? And you know, I think even beyond things like nudes, something that I noticed is that the AI really created these very these images that adhered very traditionally to sort of like standard beauty practice or
beauty standards. So like they lightened skin tones, they slim noses, they make they make the women like much more sort of traditionally like sexualized. And I think, like, what does that tell you about the limits of AI as it's currently being used, Because I would imagine that if you have, you know, limitless ability to render things, having it be so so having the things that are rendered adhere to such traditional understandings of the limits of gender, the limits
of beauty, whatever, these very conventional attitudes. It is so disappointing and such a like, such a it says, so I feel like it might say something about how this technology is being used. So I think that we should we should definitely talk about the implicit bias aspect of it. And this is something that I'm really passionate about. Is technology holds the bi or algorithms hold the bias of the programmer. So whoever's training them has the biases that
are being reproduced and regurgitated in these images. So the hyper sexualization of women, that's because most likely the person training these algorithms is somebody who's looking for hyper sexuality, like like if they are if they're inputting images of women that look promiscuous, of course it's going to regurgitate that, Like if they're inputting images of only white women, or only Asian women, or only women that look a certain way.
Whenever it's faced with an image that does not look like that, it's going to try to do its best to emulate those images while also trying to stay true. Allegedly,
to what the original image look like. But most of the time when you see black people who have used it, their skin is significantly lightened, or their hair texture is changed, or a lot of different things, and so it's not in alignment with people's actual characteristics, which I think is also really weird, because why would you want to pay for something that people have repeatedly told you doesn't give accurate renderings of yourself and you're wasting your money? And
I just I don't get that one either. But more importantly, I think that if we're going to talk about how this is regulated and how this app itself perpetuates like all of the modern stereotypes of what people look like, then we have to talk about implacit bias and how it's inherently anti black and ablest and anti trans and a bunch of other things all within like the conversation
of what the biases of these algorithms are. I think that's why the simplest way to put it is that this is a much deeper black hole than just like the Twitter thread. It's so much deeper than that, and it requires so much more conversation and critical understanding. And I think the other thing is people don't believe that reading is fundamental. Like if people picked up a book or or googled for five minutes, they could find out all of the information they needed to tell them why
this was a bad idea. But they don't. They see a trend and they have on the bandwagon and don't think about what it means for them, and then they act shocked or surprised afterwards like, oh, nobody told me, Or they label people who bring up these conversations as lead eyes who are anti technological development and that kind of stuff. And I think that that's ridiculous as well, because most of the people who are critiguing this are people who are in the industry more. After a quick break,
let's get right back into it. Something that we talk about a lot on the show are that it really seems to be marginalized people, in this case, black women who are doing a lot of the I don't know questioning of technology, like like AI and the way that
it is being used to cause harm. Do you find that to be the case, like in the field, the people who are sort of asking the poking questions about ethics in AI, do you find that that tends to be people who are marginalized or even more specifically like black women. I definitely do. I think that oftentimes we're expected to be the ones who bear the burden of accountability when it comes to how we engage with these technologies.
I think that in a field like electrical engineering, for example, when there's less than three percent of us in the field, oftentimes we are we are doing a liquork. We are talking about the anti blackness, we are talking about the hyper sexualization of black women. We are talking about this categorization and the other biases that are present. And I don't think that there's anybody else that really advocates for these things because it's not a part of their interest, right.
So these are the same people who are programming and developing these algorithms. Of course they don't see a flaw in the ways in which they function. And I think that this goes all the way back to just like my senior research when I was in college, when I was working on my project and I had a professor who told me that implicit bias didn't actually exist and
that I was creating a problem in my head. And then when I provided evidence of this, he tried to gas like me and told me that it was made up evidence, until all of a sudden he decided it was good research. And then he said that he was going to publish his own study on this using my research and my results, which I thought was really wild. And so I think that oftentimes Black women are expected
to be like the mules. We're supposed to do all of the heavy work, and then somebody else gets the gratification, somebody else gets the credit. And I think that's true
across all different disciplines in life. Just like a lot of times black women are the trailblazers, especially as the most educated or college educated demographic in the nation, we are oftentimes sought out to provide the knowledge, but then not credited or given the resources in order to expand on our knowledge sets because we've given people what they want and they've milked us for what we have to offer, and then they think that they can discard us. I
think that that's so. I mean, who gets the credit is also who has the power, right, And so you're your professor being like, no, no, no, that doesn't exist, and then when he feels sufficiently like it does exist, Oh, now I'm going to write my own paper about it, and so that I'll get the credit for pointing out something that has spent the last couple of weeks gas
lighting you about saying doesn't exist. You know, It's like that is clearly a a a push pull about who has power, who has legitimacy, and that matters so much in these fields. It definitely does, especially when you have to lobby for a seat at the table in the first place. It's like AI was, in itself is already something that's, like I said, very biased, and it's not very inclusionary, even in terms of who's developing the algorithms.
And so you have organizations like the Algorithm Justice League that are working tirelessly, which was also founded by a black woman. Um you have UM what else? You have a j O, You have black and AI and a whole bunch of other different words that are trying to bring attention to the ethical imbalances that are present within AI and development. And the work is taken and people celebrate it. However, oftentimes the people who are behind the
work are overlooked. And I don't think that there's really ever space for conversations around this unless we're creating the conversations ourselves, which is pretty terrible and not all not all that encouraging, And so I think that now more than ever, this is when the black women who are in the field I really have to rally around each other and rally around our youth in order to develop a wave of people who are equally as passionate and
equally as qualified to create the ripples in this industry, because nobody else is going to do it if we're not facilitating the conversations A fucking men. Are there alternatives for folks who might be interested in checking out AI and like AI arts, but doing someone a way that might be safer or less harmful, or might have less
ethical implications. I personally will not list any other apps because I feel that there's risks associated with all of them, and like everything, I mean, every app that we use has a risk. But I'm not necessarily here to endorse any AI based art generator. I would encourage people to learn about building algorithms themselves, learn about how to input something and get an output on your own, as opposed to trusting a system and handing over your data to somebody.
There's plenty of beginner algorithm development works workshops and different tutorials that you can access online that you can do on your own. Um And I encourage people to learn the fundamentals of it actually before trying to get results that they can post on social media. That's just me personally. I know that people in the thread did list some
of their like ideal creations. I think that acts like mid Journey that people are using for prop based image generation have their own risks and have their own harms. I also think that if you look at some of the art, it's really creepy, and you're better off just paying people who paint for real to do these images like some of the have you seen AI hands and
fingers creepy and they are very creepy. And so I think that, like I said, people should just explore like the fundamentals of algorithms, understanding layers, understanding outputs, understanding bounding boxes simplistically, um And I think that knowledge about that would one make them more intentional when it comes to how they choose to interact with AI, but then also give them the skills that that they need in order to create the art that they're seeking to create on
their own without infringing on the rights of other creatives that are working tirelessly to paint real images or to create real digital art without using AI generators. I just think that there's a way that we can do this that doesn't violate people, or there's ways that people can
participate without violating other people. And if you have a genuine interest in learning it, then I encourage people to seek that out as opposed to trying to hop on the fast wave and using apps like Lensa or whatever other AI generators are really popular right now. Yeah, I will say about the you know, you brought up the intellectual property rights issues. I did see a couple of the Lensa generated images where if you looked real close in the bottom corner, you would see a watermark or
like a like a signature. And so we have this idea that, oh, this is just being generated I uh, computer artist robots somewhere, and it's like, no, if it has a signature, they've just lifted this image from another human artist and maybe changed a little something about it, and now they're giving it back to you and calling
it a high art. Absolutely, And I think that that's another big thing right now is that a lot of artists are fighting for their rights to their own images after their artwork has been fed into the AI generators, and the generators are producing something that's a little bit more enhanced, and then people are publishing it and selling it as their own and AI R I mean, the original artist isn't getting any of their credits and being robbed of their i P and their copyright because well,
AI generated eight and so they're allowed to evade responsibility for infringing on that person's work. That's another problem that I think correlates to all of this is that the output images technically don't have owners, like, yes, the app owns it, but there's no individual person that gains rights over these images. And that means that there's no identity associated with who maybe train the AI to turn people's images into nudes, or who input somebody's nudes into these
images or publish them accordingly. I think that it allows people to dodge responsibility a lot, and it violates other people who are actively trying to establish themselves because they're passionate about real art. Because people want to participate in a fad that doesn't really have any net benefit besides fast images. But I don't understand why people would want images that violate the rights and violate ethics. How can
folks get a better understanding of AI. I just encourage people to read books and and if you if you want to learn more, read read. I think that there's
so many different studies that are out right now. So many different people have been screaming at the top of their lungs how we have to be cognizant of the ways in which AI is used and how we propagated in society, and a lot of people have not done the reading and our mindlessly participating in different social media trends without understanding how they perpetuate the harms that they claim that they want to mitigate, whether it be child
pornography or different industries that infringe upon the rights and the autonomy of other people. I don't think that people are paying acute attention to how they are exacerbating these problems. And so when we facilitate a conversation around that and we are intentional about learning about these things, I think that it creates a more safe interaction with AI. I won't say it makes AI a safe place, because I don't think that that exists at this time, but it
does make our interactions with AI a little bit safer. Well, I'm so glad that you're out there like poking everyone to be a little bit more informed and asking the questions to make this very very powerful technology a little bit more ethical. Is there a place where folks can follow all the work that you're up to. So I have a tech Instagram that I'll be posting kind of like this good and continuing this conversation on It's called public phocology. P O L Y s A c O
l O g Y. Sorry I can't still. And then my regular at is at melan and elevating M E l A N I N E L E v A T I N got a story about an interesting thing in tech. I just want to say Hi. You can reach just at Hello at tang godi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me bridgetad. It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Tara Harrison
is our producer. Sound engineer Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from i heeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.