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gotmattitude · 5 years

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leave me with a price to pay

WHO: Santana Lopez ( @trickstersantana ) & Matt Rutherford.

WHAT: Santana has something important to tell Matt.

WHEN: May 28th, 2019.

WHERE: Sciron 106.

WARNINGS: stabbing, racism, transphobia, dysphoria, dehumanization, murder, gore, body image issues.

Santana tries really hard to not run to Matt's sciron door, but she definetivelly walks fasts. The place is a disaster after the earthquakes, but it's now or never. Later the security would be too much. She carries desperation, anger, exitement, helpleness and a knife in her bag. Next to her Hamlet book and a talisman. Before knocking at the door, she adjust her sunglasses. I can't wait to crush them on the floor when I stop needing them. She knows she didn't prepare Matt as she did with Elise or Ryder, but it has to be now before her fake family does something or Matt decides to go to doppel camp. "...hi?" She says really high and softly. She can't even talk because of the nerves. She tries again. "Open the fucking door!"

Matt grumbles under his breath when he hears Santana's voice, almost falling out of the chair as he makes his way to the door. "Jesus, I'm coming," he says, but shakes it off as he pulls it open. She said it was important, and there hadn't even been some biting comment about Marley ending the world or anything. He wonders what it's about. "Hey," he greets, and steps aside to let her in. "What's up?"

Santana enters without saying anything, and closes the door behind her. Then locks it. Then she looks at Matt, wondering where to start. "Alright so, as I have been telling you sometimes, I need help for...a really important thing. That I have been wanting to do for years." She says, very serious and still nervous, like a little girl on her birthday wondering if she is finally tall enough to ride the rollercoaster. One little girl that takes rollercoaster really seriously as her main goal in life. That wasn't a good metaphor. She tries to continue. "And for that I need your trust, my friend." And your kidney. "For me this is death or life, alright? Will you do it, Matt?"

Matt finds himself crossing his arms over his chest as the aura kicks in, but he pushes through it. Behind the aura, the uncertainty, and probably just straight-up nervousness at seeing his friend like this, serious and a little vulnerable, there's the friendship, the history. "I trust you with my goddamn life, Santana." A cascade of doubt starts nudging against him. What if she asks him to kill someone? What if she's just fucking with him? What if she's been manipulating him into thinking they're friends just for this--That's just the aura. It's the aura. It's only the aura. "What do you need?"

Santana tries to contain her smile, but she can't. She hopes it doesn't look suspicious, or too evil."Ha ha...thank you, my dear friend." That's just what I need. She takes Matt's right hand with her hands. Holding it, looking at them. Then at him, hoping he won't laught. "I need you to help me become a human being."

Matt's chest jolts when she smiles, and he's not sure what that means. He squeezes her hand with his, not taking his eyes off of hers, holding his breath. And when she does look at him, another jolt. Is it fear? Hesitation? Endearment? He can't make sense of anything he's feeling, and he breathes out slowly. His eyebrows are furrowed and his gaze shifts down to their hands for a moment. This is years in the making and she's asking him. He looks back up to her, and swallows, steadying his voice. "How are we gonna do that?"

Santana keeps staring at him, but not really looking, when he answers. Why do you accept it so easily? No questioning. Of course she wants to be a human. Why would anyone question that, even if she never talked about it with almost anyone. This is just what you wanted it."I..." She stops holding Matt's hand to search in her bag for the book of Hamlet. She shows Matt, even when she knows it wouldn't mean anything to him. "There is a magic ritual for it. But it needs like, true trust for it. A trust already hard to get for normal people, so you can imagine how hard is for tricksters." She explains, nervously, hugging the book again.

Matt looks at the book, as he gets increasingly nervous. His magic, ordinary and popular, already uses pieces of death to perform spells. What does a magical ritual to transform someone into a human being entail? Massive amounts of energy. His energy? His body? It takes him a second of processing to really hear what Santana's saying. "The aura," he says, biting on the inside of his cheek, and stays quiet for a long second. He understands, he guesses. But she'd never given him a reason not to trust her, and a spark of bitterness rises up from his stomach. Normal people, she'd said. Not an animal. "This is what you want, right? That's how you see yourself."

Santana opens the book. For Matt, it couldn't look more normal. If he tries to read it, it's just Shakespeare's Hamlet. She sees the illusion that floats above the pages, showing the shared knowledge of thousand of tricksters. She moves her hand to go to her favorite page: Human Sacrifices Rituals. She puts the book open on top of Matt's bed. Obviously, she knows it from memory. But only tricksters could see the illusion. If she can see the book as just a book after it, she knows it worked. "Yes. This is what I want. I never wanted anything more in my life than this." She says. "Do you have charcoal or chalk or something? I have to draw a circle in the floor." She doesn't, but that way it looks more real. "I'll clean it after it."

Matt's heart is gaining speed, palms sweaty. He glances down at the book and raises an eyebrow. "Did Shakespeare hide messages in all of his books?" It's a stupid question, and his laugh at the end of it is nervous, but the tension has been building steadily since Santana sent that text, and a part of him is craving easiness right now. When she confirms this is what she wants, he takes one of her hands, and nods. "Then I guess this is what we're doing today." At her request, he digs through his hoodoo altar to the side of the room, and scoops up pieces of loose charcoal, and hands them to Santana. A charcoal circle is vaguely familiar, unlike the rest of the ritual, so it provides a sort of relief. "Sorry it's not in great shape." He chews on his lip for a moment, gears turning. "What should I do?"

Santana laughs a bit, not genuine, the laugh you give to a person who is trying to make a fun joke and fails, but you laugh because you are friends with that person. "Hahaha, no. It's just a cover. I think it's Hamlet because of the infinite m...an infinite whatever theorem. I don't think it matters much." She mentions while taking the charcoal, she doesn't mind the shape, and drawing some fancy magic circle with a lot of details. She actually didn't know how to draw, so she illusioned an actual nice drawing. "Hey, it's a trust ritual. It's all about that. So I can't tell you what's about. You have to trust me." She says. "So if there is a point you don't, tell me. Pretending you do won't work." She explains, unsure. She finishes the pretending drawing. She stands up and points at it. "Lie there. Face up."

Matt didn't know Santana could draw, and it's captivating to look at her adding more detail to the circle, so he sits on his bed, watching her. It adds to his confidence that she knows what she's doing. "Okay," he says, wiping off the sweat from his palms on his pants while she's distracted with the drawing. "No questions." He follows her around with his eyes as she draws, a light chuckle trapped in his chest. "I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm nervous. And yeah, the aura's there. But I don't have to pretend." He's supposed to lie on the circle. Of course. Because this is a magic ritual. He thinks of Quinn for a moment, trapped in her own body. Would that happen to him too? The aura. It's the aura. Santana is badass, and great at her magic. It's just the aura talking. He stands from his spot on the bed, and lowers himself onto the circle, vaguely aware the charcoal is going to get on his clothes. Once he's flat on the ground, he glances in her direction. "Lied down. Face up." He breathes out slowly. I trust her. I trust her. I trust her. I trust her.

Santana wonders if that is what real trust is. No questions? Is this how its suppose to be? She takes from her bag the last and only useful thing Mike Chang has ever done, giving him a silent talisman. She puts it on the door. It's supposed to create a silent room. No one would hear any scream. This is the third time she tried this. She lied to Elise, telling her it was because she needed a kidney to keep living. Ryder knew how cool was being a human and how crap was stop being it. *Third is the charm. It's all going perfectly. This is the closest I had been to this. She doesn't answer Matt saying he's nervous, she just goes to pick up her knife without him seeing her, hiding it behind her back on one hand. She sits on the floor next to him, on his side. "Show me your stomach." She says, remembering all the surgery videos she has memorized for this. "And look, this might look scary and suspicious, but...trust me on this, Matt. I know what I am doing."

Matt is sweating all over now. What is this ritual? Is it even real? He could trust Santana all he wanted, but what if she believes in something that is designed not to work? Truth be told, he's let her down more than she ever has. He owes her a fair chance--he wants to give her a fair chance. What if the purpose of the ritual is to build up a fuckton of tension, and then in the end it's nothing but a tickle? He lifts up his shirt, and tries to even his breaths. Scary and suspicious. He can prepare himself for scary and suspicious. "I trust you," he says, and places his hands at his sides. "You know what you're doing." She knows what she's doing. She knows what she's doing. She knows what she's doing.

Santana lifts his shirt more. And puts her hand on his stomach, calculating the cut. The knife still at her back. "Alright Matt, now something is going to happen, and you might think it's scary. But just stay still, and trust me." She says, letting him a time to breathe. A time for him to prepare. She takes the knife out. "Now. Don't move."

Matt breathes. Scary. Suspicious. Trust me. What could possibly be more scary than the anticipation? "Okay," he whispers, taking a second to close his eyes. When he opens his eyes, she has a knife. "Fuck," his voice wavers. This is it. What happens now? Does she pretend she's going to stab him, and then thank him for his trust? Does she stab him, like the O kid and her "dad" had warned him about? Does she take his blood? He squeezes his eyes shut, and clenches his fists. "ItrustyouItrustyou," he mutters, his breathing picking up speed. She wouldn't kill him. She wouldn't. She wouldn't.

Santana looks at him. Alright. He isn't running. This is good. She just as to stab the knife, take the kidney, and eat it. Ew. She thinks. She actually hopes this is like the binding of Isaac and some kind of God stop her last minute and make it work, because if not, it's going to be a mess. She holds the knife closer to Matt stomach, still not stabbing him. This is it. Now just fucking do it. Just fucking do it. This is what you always wanted. Nothing is stopping you. "I'm going to do it. It's going to be over soon. Thank you, my dearest friend." She smiles, and holds the knife higher.

Matt squeezes his eyes shut even tighter, and his thoughts are racing. Over soon? Is she going to kill him? No. No, she wouldn't. She wouldn't kill him. She won't. She means her pain, her suffering, her struggle.... right? Why does she want his stomach exposed? What if she tries to take some blood, and he dies right there, like an idiot, and he still doesn't know James's family? His family? No, no, she knows what she's doing. She said she did. She said so. But does she? Does she really know what she's doing? She's his age. She's in Naturalization. Ah, fuck. She doesn't know what she's doing. His eyes fly open, and he finds her with the fucking knife in her hand, and a smile in her face. "Wait," he blurts out. "I don't... I'm sorry. I can't do this."

"Oh, thank God." Santana blurts out, letting out a breath. Wait, what? What the fuck did I just said? No! This is a betrayal! I am dissapointed! I felt hurt! She looks at her reflection on the blade, still sitting next to Matt, not moving away. Or reacting anymore. "...I...didn't expected this. I thought... this is so... disapointing?" She still looks at the knife in her hand. "What the hell?"

Matt is bracing himself for a speech, or tears, or for Santana to not hear him and stab his ass anyway, so when he hears her sound relieved, he pushes himself onto his elbows. "Did you just say thank God?" he asks, shifting between looking at her face and the knife, the remnants of adrenaline making his heart pump in his ears. She seems confused. "Santana?" Matt asks gently as he sits up. "What do you mean?"

Santana leaves out the longest "Mmmmm..." while still looking at the knife. "That was weird. I'm sure I didn't say that. I'm actually very angry and hurt right now." She says, deadpan. She looks at the book of Hamlet. She still can see the illusions. "Hey Matt, can I ask you a question...about your dark secret magic?"

Matt decides it's probably not in his best interest to insist she did, while she still held a knife in her hand, which she had intended to use on him. He doesn't comment on it just yet. She looks like she's in shock, anyway. His heart sinks lightly when she asks about his magic. He kind of feels like he's walking into a trap, but it's not like she doesn't already know his secret. "What about it?"

Santana plays with the knife on her hands. "You said Puck found about it. On Brownstone." She stands up, and picks up her Hamlet book. "Who did you used it against?"

Matt looks down. He opens his mouth, and closes it again. The incident had been pushed so far behind in his mind that he rarely thinks about it, and when he does, he can shut it down just as quickly as the thought had emerged. He shut his eyes, and pushed himself away from Santana. "The selkies," he whispers. "I used my magic against the selkies."

Santana smiles. "Ah, just as I thought." She says, holds the knife blade down, and leaves it fall, nail down to the floor. "Is that? You wanted to help, and be a nice friend, and don't let poor little me suffer the same fate, wouldn't you?" She asks him. "You know a real human would had survive that, right? A real human would survive that because a real human wouldn't had get attacked in the first place, isn't it, Matt?" She comments, approaching him. "But in the end, you couldn't do it. You know I'll be way happier and safer that way, but you can't do it, right?"

Matt flinches back, and the tremors in his muscles from the adrenaline intensify. This, this is what he thought would happen, and now he doesn't feel ready at all. "You're right," he says, and he doesn't try to conceal the unsteadiness in his voice. "You're right. If they'd been human we would have been out of that room as soon as we realized Kurt wasn't there. I got Puck's gun against my head because he thought I was a monster, like he thought they were fucking monsters. You're right." Matt shuffles backwards slightly, and Aether, fuck, God, this is exactly like right after Brownstone, when he'd been afraid of her for the first time. "No, I can't fucking do it. I'm not going to bleed out on my floor because you think it's gonna solve your fucking mental health problems!"

Santana stares at him. "But you have it better, you know? You always look like a human." She laughs, bitterly. "Mental health problems? Is that what you think it is?" She stops laughing, and frows. "You liar." She grabs him from the neck of his shirt. "Did my health problems trapped me there, Matt? Is that? Is my mind creating all of those people trying to kill me? I can't believe it! It was my health problems oppresing me all this time!" She says, letting him go."It was a trust ritual, not a blood ritual, Matt." She lies as if she really believed it. "It wasn't going to happend. But let's go with your theory..." She walks around. "Do you think that's what's going to fucking fix everything for me? Boom, magic, all your problems vanish now! I want to change my entire being, and you are like...sure! No questions asked. Why ask what would that mean for me? I-is that going to fucking change my entire personality? Am I going to be reborn or whatever into a person? What the hell becoming human means?" She starts to ramble, angry.

Matt sighs forcefully, and gestures with one hand. "I fucking know that! I'm an ignorant fucking dick that took glamour for two whole shitfuck minutes and whined about it to you. I know, and I'm sorry about that shit. I know it's easier." He holds his breath as Santana grabs him, trying and failing to keep his expression neutral. "Don't fucking lecture me about oppression. Don't. You still think you're an animal and that's why you want to be human. You think I don't get it? Wanting to change your body so people will fucking just stop?" Stepping back, he laughs, empty. "You were fucking relieved when I said no. Fucking admit that. You said 'thank God', and you're not fooling me when you deny that shit." Matt crosses his arms over his chest, and rolls his eyes. The fuck is she talking about? "You said you'd been planning this shit for years! I thought you knew what you were talking about! I don't fucking know what becoming human means. You tell me. What did you think it meant?"

Santana is glad she put the fucking talisman because she is going to scream. "You don't know anything. Oh! Sure! It's the fucking same! Changing your body and getting a whole new one, because you are actually a fucking 34cm rat! They're fucking different species, Matt!" She pushes him. "And I was fucking disappointed when you said yes!" She closes her fists. "You know, it's fucking shit when the whole world hates you, and you hate you even more, but still I won't fucking mind if at least my friends wouldn't agree! Without being certain there's a chance they'll probably murder me if I was on my animal form.” She starts to tear up. "Yes, Santana, you should change!, You have potential! Why is never Why would you want to change, there is nothing wrong with you?" She get rids of some tears. "Exactly! You don't fucking know! And you didn't even care to ask!" She doesn't know want to answer that question. And she is tired. "Anything more to say? Because if not, I'm fucking leaving."

Matt can't say anything for a long time. Santana pushes him physically once, but it's like she keeps doing it, over and over, with every sentence that rings too true to him. It dawns upon him that he thought he understood Santana as someone who knew exactly what she wanted and needed, that her demons were similar to his, colored in a different shade. He blinks for a second in perplexed silence, until she says she's leaving. "Wait, I..." Matt swallows. "I fucking love you, alright? And that's not a... I would love you if you were different. I love you. I thought you... I thought you knew better than me. I don't know." It strikes him, not quite for the first time, that maybe he's been doing this friendship thing completely wrong. "I have to think about this. I don't know if I should be the guy that decides whether or not it's cool for you to want something I don't fucking understand. I thought I was..." What? Being a hero? Superior to anyone who wouldn't lie there waiting to be stabbed to prove he's a good person? "I don't know." He sighs, running a hand through his hair. "I'm sorry."

Santana picks up her stuff, but leaves the knife. She didn't expect that. She stays, looking at the door, giving her back to Matt. Grabbing her bag. "Oh, love." She had a dozen complains about it. "If you think I knew better, would you stick at knowing worse?" Of course he doesn't have to decide. "I'm not asking you to chose, I was... I'm...I'm leaving." She said, removing the talisman, getting out and slamming the door when she gets out.

#para: all #para: trickstersantana #trickstersantana: all #para: leave me with a price to pay #para: 040 #trickstersantana

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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‘Frankenstein’s Monster:’ Images of Sexual Abuse Are Fueling Algorithmic Porn

Content warning: This article includes firsthand accounts of sexual abuse.

A collection of thousands of photographs of naked women that is being used to create machine learning-generated porn includes images from porn production companies that have been accused of lying to and coercing women to have sex on camera.

The dataset, which is circulating in deepfake porn creation communities online, includes images scraped from Czech Casting, a porn production company in the Czech Republic that police have accused of human trafficking and rape, as well as still images from videos produced by Girls Do Porn, which was ordered to pay almost $13 million to 22 women who appeared in its videos, and whose founder is currently a fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list.

Much like thispersondoesnotexist.com, which uses a machine learning algorithm and thousands of pictures of human faces to produce photorealistic images of people who don't exist, the dataset is being used to generate photorealistic images of nude women who aren’t real and don't look exactly like any one person. One person using the dataset is creating what he describes as "a Harem of millions of actresses" that can be inserted into deepfake porn, while another is using the dataset to create what he describes as "porn generated entirely by AI."

Motherboard has downloaded and viewed the dataset containing images from Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn, as well as several others being used to create machine learning-generated porn.

The people who anonymously use these datasets say that since the final algorithmically-generated images they create technically aren't of real people, they don't harm anyone. In fact, they argue that their creations are a step towards a future where porn will not require human porn performers at all. But legal experts, technologists, and women who are included in the datasets described these creations as uniquely dehumanizing.

Motherboard has written extensively about how deepfakes and internet platforms' inability to sufficently curtail the spread of nonconsensual pornography upends the lives of and continually traumatizes women. This new form of machine learning-generated porn and the datasets it relies on introduces a new form of abuse, where the worst moments of some women's lives, captured on camera, are preserved, decontextualized, and spread online in service of creating porn whose makers claim to feature people who don't actually exist.

Honza Červenka, a lawyer at McAllister Olivarius law firm who specializes in revenge porn and technology, is originally from the Czech Republic and has been following the case of Czech Casting, which is owned by Netlook, the country’s largest porn company. He told Motherboard that the idea that images are less harmful because they're run through an algorithm and "anonymized" is a red herring.

"It's mad science really, and completely and utterly re-victimizing to the victims of the Czech Casting perpetrators," he said.

"It feels unfair, it feels like my freedom is being taken away," Jane, a woman who said she was coerced into shooting a scene for Czech Casting, told Motherboard.

The casting couch trap

Jane, who asked to remain pseudonymous to speak about a traumatizing incident, remembers her hands shaking as she read over a contract for Czech Casting. She was there to support her friend, who needed money for rent. They'd answered an advertisement for a modeling gig, and decided to go together. They'd both just turned 18. They didn't know what kind of modeling it was; the ad was vague about details. Someone picked them up at a metro stop and took them to a house on the outskirts of Prague.

(In an interview with Czech bodybuilder Antonin Hodan posted to YouTube, a male performer in Czech Casting videos named Alekos Begaltsis admitted that the women who show up for shoots sometimes don't know what they're in for because of deceptive advertising.

"The girls get here through agencies as well with the help of private agents or through friends, anyone can recommend," Begaltsis said. "We can't control every piece of information in the advertising. It can happen that a girl gets here thinking she'll do an underwear photoshoot. Which sucks because we are powerless in these situations. We are trying to push them to write the truth [in the ads]. Unfortunately it's not always the case. But once she gets here, we inform her about everything.")

Once at the studio, a woman at the reception desk took Jane's ID.

"We sat in a waiting room and got up to leave two or three times, but someone would always come up and tell us to stay, to not be afraid," she said. "We were scared to leave so we stayed."

A woman called them one by one into a room with a white sofa where the filming would take place, and handed them a contract saying the videos wouldn't be accessible to anyone in the Czech Republic. This part of the arrangement is similar to the lie Girls Do Porn told women about how their videos were only going to be distributed to "collectors" in New Zealand. In reality, Girls Do Porn videos were published and sold in the U.S. and promoted on Pornhub.

Czech Casting does indeed block users trying to access it from the Czech Republic, Motherboard confirmed by trying to access the site using a virtual private network. But people within the country can also easily circumvent the block using a VPN, which is free and easy to set up. Additionally, as women who accused Czech Casting of wrongdoing have said, their families and friends quickly discovered their videos, which were reposted to popular free tube sites, where sometimes their real names were doxed.

"Weeks later I started getting messages…These were mostly from men saying how beautiful I was and if they could have sex with me," Jane said. "I got so many of these messages and keep getting them. I even changed my Facebook name because of this."

After she signed the contract, a man came in and asked her if she was a virgin. She said that she felt like she had no way out, and that she couldn't leave without her ID.

"After I said yes, he took the camera and told me to get naked," Jane said. "I was told they were going to film something soft. . .I was scared to speak out."

Jane said they put the money into her hands as she was leaving. She wasn't given a copy of the contract she signed, or any proof that she'd been there at all.

"My friend found the room we were in on a porn site," Jane said. "I realised this was a massive fuck-up. I kept thinking we should have left even if it means not having our IDs on us."

In another Czech Casting video, a woman, who Motherboard was able to confirm is included in the dataset, starts crying while having sex and asks the man to stop. The man stops, and the camera zooms in to show that she is bleeding. He hands her a towel and tells her to clean up the blood.

Jane's story about Czech Casting isn't unique. Multiple women have accused Czech Casting of coercing them into having sex on camera. Czech police have charged nine people involved with Netlook, the company behind Czech Casting, of human trafficking and rape. Daisy Lee, a woman who went on to a career in porn after her Czech Casting scene and who is now friendly with Begaltsis, said the site has ruined lives.

"I was 18 and didn't know what I was getting myself into. Most girls do not. The majority of them stay, but some leave. It ruins many lives," Lee told Motherboard.

In a statement published in July by the adult entertainment news site Xbiz, Netlook denied the accusations and said it is cooperating with the police. Netlook did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment.

GeneratedPorn

In September, four years after Jane shot her scene for Czech Casting, a PhD student opened a new forum to show off his latest personal AI project: algorithmically-generated porn.

The person making these videos goes by the username "GeneratedPorn," and named the r/GeneratedPorn subreddit to post about the technology (we'll refer to this user as "GP" in this story). He said he started the project because he wanted to improve his machine learning skills. Like some of the earliest deepfakes that were posted online in 2017, what he shared were glitchy, spasming facsimiles of the images they're trained on: thousands of porn videos and images. Unlike much deepfake porn, the images GP is producing wouldn't fool anyone into thinking they are real porn. The final result barely looks human, let alone like a specific person.

Do you have experience with “casting couch” producers, or knowledge of how non-consensual porn spreads online? We’d love to hear from you. Contact Samantha Cole securely on the messaging app Signal at +6469261726, direct message on Twitter, or by email: [email protected]

But much like early deepfakes, they're rapidly improving in realism. GP has posted several experiments in the past few weeks featuring increasingly accurate naked human bodies, and even some slightly animated images, showing that convincing "porn generated entirely by AI" is not impossible.

"This all started as a quest for me to learn how all of this cool tech worked but then I ended up pivoting into the porn generation stuff as I thought it was a cool concept, especially after watching the movie Her," GP said in an email to Motherboard.

GP explained his process to Motherboard over email, as well as in detail on Reddit, posted in the popular r/MachineLearning community. He used a Stylegan2 model that's available on Github as open-source code, but loaded it with datasets of porn. It's similar to how any other face-swapping deepfake is made, but instead of using a dataset consisting of many expressions of one person's face, he pulled from multiple datasets found online.

To create the videos, GP trained the algorithms using datasets from around the web, including one that primarily consists of images ripped from Czech Casting. The datasets, which are hosted and are free to download from popular file sharing sites, are compiled by users experimenting in deepfakes and other forms of algorithmically generated images. GP found the Czech Casting dataset on one of these file sharing websites, but said that if he didn't he would have written a web scraper to collect the images from Czech Casting.

This is because of the scope and uniformity of the porn that Czech Casting has created.

A censored sample of the Czech Casting dataset.

Creating algorithmically generated videos of a full, naked body requires many images and videos of real, nude people, and it's hard to imagine a more suitable resource for the task than Czech Casting.

Czech Casting, much like Girls Do Porn, specialized in casting couch-style porn, and has posted thousands of videos of women over the years. Its production style was almost algorithmic to begin with: Each video of a woman also comes with a uniform set of photographs. Each set includes a photograph of the woman holding a yellow sign with a number indicating her episode number, like a mugshot board. Each set also includes photographs of the women posing in a series of dressed and undressed shots on a white background: right side, left side, front, back, as well as extreme close ups of the face, individual nipples, and genitalia. In recent years, Czech Casting also started including 360-degrees photographs of the women, where they pose for interactive VR-style content.

"The main reason people opt for a data source like this, is that the generative adversarial models (GAN) people use, are trying to learn a general structure of an image for the class of objects you're trying to generate," GP said. "If your images are structurally similar, the model can learn more about the finer/granular details of the item class, like dimples or freckles on a face. Which leads to a higher quality result."

GP sent Motherboard a sample of the dataset he's using, which also included images from Girls Do Porn videos. Other datasets that GP is using, which Motherboard has viewed, include images that appear to be scraped from across the internet, including other porn sites, social media, and subreddits where users post selfies, like r/roastme, a subreddit where people post images of themselves for other people to judge.

Gigabytes of questionably-sourced images

In a post to the r/MachineLearning subreddit explaining how his algorithmically generated porn works, GP pauses halfway through the explanation to address "a potential ethical issue."

"I wasn't sure what to do with it, other than it being this cool thing I'd created… I'd contemplated making an OnlyFans and offering personalised AI generated nudes that talk to people," he wrote. "But someone I knew frowned upon this idea and said it was exploitative of Males who might need companionship. So I decided not to go down that route in order to avoid the ethical can of worms."

He also noted in that post that training dataset ethics is something he's concerned about. "Are the images we are training on ethical or have the people in the images been exploited in some way[?]" he wrote. "I again can't verify the back story behind hundreds of thousands of images, but I can assume some of the images in the dataset might have an exploitative power dynamic behind them," noting that some of the images are from Girls Do Porn. "I'm not sure if it's even possible to blacklist exploitative data if it's been scraped from the web. I need to consider this a bit more."

These questions didn’t stop GP from building the project in public, on social media platforms, which means he’s perpetrating harm regardless of whatever ethical quandaries he says he may have. Much of the most harmful nonconsensual content is spread on the internet through surface-level platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, OnlyFans, and tube sites like XVideos and Pornhub.

"So many mainstream porn websites host child pornography and nonconsensual pornography, and does depict rape, and profit from those through ad sales," Červenka said.

When Motherboard contacted Reddit for comment, a spokesperson said Reddit's site-wide policies "prohibit involuntary pornography, which applies to all content, including deepfakes." Reddit banned deepfakes in 2017. Both r/GeneratedPorn and r/AIGeneratedPorn were shut down after Motherboard's request for comment.

Generated Porn's user profile on Pornhub was also taken down after Motherboard contacted Pornhub. A spokesperson for Pornhub declined to comment.

Porn tube site xHamster took down GP's user profile pending further review: "These new types of content are indeed grey areas and we will need to review with our own machine learning team and TOS team to determine how to evaluate and where necessary prevent," a spokesperson for xHamster said.

XVideos, another free tube site, directed Motherboard to a content removal form.

OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment. Patreon, where GP was asking for people to fund his project with little success, told Motherboard that while funding nonconsensual sexual content isn't permitted on the platform, if an account does contain nonconsensual porn, the platform works with the creator to bring the account within its terms of use. The project was taken down from Patreon as of Monday.

Twitter directed Motherboard to its nonconsensual nudity policy and rules for sensitive media.

"Now somebody walks up and uses those images to create a baseline for computers to use, potentially for decades to come, to use for computer generated images?”

In an email to Motherboard, GP expressed another ethical concern: that the algorithm might produce something that is recognizable as a real human—a result that would negate the whole point of his project: anonymity.

"It's quite possible for the algorithm to reproduce fake people who resemble real people, but it wouldn't be a 1-to-1 replication of the data it has trained on," he said. "This presents an ethical problem I'm trying to navigate around, which is identifying the rare situations where it does replicate a person from the ~7,500 images it's learning from. It's something that plagues generative networks… It's possible and I'm not quite sure how to 100% avoid the possibility of this happening. But I really do want to avoid this. I'm not interested in deep-faking anyone, even by accident, it's a bit scummy imho!"

GP is far from alone in this type of project. The creator of the first deepfakes told Motherboard almost the same thing in 2017: that he wasn't a professional researcher, just a programmer with an interest in machine learning who “just found a clever way to do face-swap,” he said.

These Nudes Do Not Exist and a subsequent project from the same creator called "Harem" most likely draws its data from Czech Casting—the images come out looking unmistakably similar, but the creator of that project hasn't responded to requests for comment on where the images in their dataset come from. Another abandoned project at r/AIGeneratedPorn did the same.

The real ethical issue plaguing this project is not the risk of parting lonely men from their money. It would take one search online of Czech Casting, and some basic awareness of the concept of pirated content being harmful to creators, to recognize the datasets these non-existent women are built from are comprised of gigabytes of questionably-sourced porn, some of it potentially depicting sexual assault.

On Monday, the night before this story was published and after his Patreon account was suspended, GP told Motherboard that he “decided to shut down the project.”

"It certainly should be illegal"

Jane told Motherboard that she was hoping her video would get lost among so many others online, and no one would find it. "But there is always someone who manages to fish it out from the depths of the internet," she said.

Červenka, the lawyer at McAllister Olivarius law firm who specializes in revenge porn and technology, told Motherboard that because some of the Czech Casting videos were allegedly edited to look consensual from the start, they have always been deceptive and harmful—and churning them through the meat grinder of machine learning algorithms doesn't make them less so.

"Now somebody walks up and uses those images to create a baseline for computers to use, potentially for decades to come, to use for computer generated images? It's awful, on a personal level, and it certainly should be illegal," Červenka said.

Even for professional porn performers, stolen content is an issue that plagues the industry. Adult performer Leah Gotti, whose images are part of the datasets GP is using without her consent, told me that the problem of stolen content isn't just disrespectful—it's dangerous. She's currently working to stop a stalker-fan from creating fake Instagram accounts of her and targeting her family by stealing her content and reposting it.

"It just goes back to, no one truly respects sex workers," Gotti told me. "All those things are pirated, and that's supposed to be against all the rules, but because we're having sex on camera they're like, well, she asked for it."

Earlier this year, a rumored OnlyFans leak of a database of stolen porn threatened to put sex workers on that platform in danger of being harassed or doxed.

Daisy Lee, the performer who started with Czech Casting when she was 18 but continued working in the adult industry after, told Motherboard that she blames herself for thinking that the videos wouldn't go viral worldwide.

"They don't put it on Czech servers but people download it and re-upload it everywhere," Lee said. "Every girl that goes in thinks it won't be visible to their friends and family… 14 days later [my] video was everywhere. It destroyed my reputation and spread around my home town within hours. But nobody forced me to do anything, no drugs, nothing like that."

Many of the women who were targeted by Girls Do Porn also blame themselves for believing the company’s lies claiming that the videos would stay in a certain region—in that case, in private New Zealand collections, on DVD. But the entire system of porn online, and all content online for that matter, is set up to spread videos and photos the harder one tries to remove it. Algorithms are driven by what people feed them. One Czech Casting model lost her teaching job after students found her episode online, and when she spoke out about feeling victimized by the company, people sought her video out more.

Collage by Seth Laupus

"The researcher in me feels like 'if it's been published online it's open source and fair game' however the budding capitalist in me feels like that violates IP in some sense," GP said. "I'm a bit conflicted. I've personally accepted that any data I ever create as an individual will be used by others for profit or research."

GP also said that he thinks the type of abuse Czech Casting has been accused of is "horrible," but that it's difficult to screen for this kind of abuse when creating or using datasets.

"There is no such thing as ethical use of an AI that uses database images without consent”

"Now that the abuse is present I can opt to not use that data and source data from elsewhere," GP said. "Others in the area may not care and may decide to use it anyway. It's quite difficult to screen for this data completely. Doing a google image search for 'female standing nude' gives you a bunch of Czech Casting images. Throwing on the flag '-"czech"' catches a lot of them, but some still get through the cracks."

While GP said that he could choose not to use images produced by Girls Do Porn and Czech Casting, he didn't say that he would, nor is it clear if his project and others similar to it could function without those images. GP also suggested that his project could also somehow help these women.

"I feel bad for the victims of this abuse and I can't say anything that may make them feel better," he said. "My only hope is that technology such as the tech I'm working on, now and in the future, leads to a reduction in harm to others. By making it an economical and technologically inferior choice to commit abuse."

Červenka said that even after three years of deepfakes panic and decades more of nonconsensual porn online, the laws to stop them haven't caught up. Victims could make a legal claim that they've been portrayed in a false light or defamed, especially when content is edited deceptively to make it look consensual. But that's often not enough.

"These laws have been around for a long time, and we are just trying to use them in the current context, because we don't have anything else," Červenka said "The legislature is unable to truly grapple with what people do online, and how to regulate harmful effects of what people do online."

It also becomes harder to go after anyone hosting the content if they're hosting it anonymously, all over the world, where every legal system is different. Even in the U.S., where some states have enacted deepfakes-specific laws, it differs from state to state.

When the content is buried inside a dataset, the problem is that much more difficult.

Is ethical AI porn possible?

The abuses the women in Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn endured happened in the real world, but the videos spread online made it worse. Some Girls Do Porn victims were forced to change their names, move states, drop out of school, and lost their careers or relationships with family and friends. Czech Casting victims have similar stories.

Revenge porn victims—as well as professional and amateur adult performers—spend hours sending takedown requests to websites that host their images. Often, those requests are ignored. And when it comes to datasets used to create more porn, it's hard to know where your images live on, unless you can locate where it's hosted and download a huge set of files, then sort through them to find yourself. Their worst moments are enshrined forever among gigabytes of others.

There have been efforts in recent years to create machine learning datasets that are fully consensual. After the privacy failures of MS-Celeb-1M, a dataset of 10 million photos from 100,000 individuals collected from the internet, ranging from journalists to musicians and activists, there's more awareness than ever toward ethical uses of people's faces. In 2019, for its "Deepfakes Detection Challenge," Facebook launched a dataset consisting of 100,000 videos of paid actors, for researchers to use. One of the sponsors of that challenge was data science community site Kaggle. One of the datasets Generated Porn used is hosted on Kaggle, and appears to be largely stolen, scraped porn content.

If machine learning engineers interested in creating AI porn wanted to start a fully-ethical project, they would do something similar to what Facebook did with its challenge dataset.

"They would get consent from people who want to be nude models, and say this is what we're going to build it for, and everything's on the up and up," Rumman Chowdhury, data scientist and founder of ethical AI firm Parity, told Motherboard. "And maybe even [models] would get royalties, [engineers] would go build their AI, sell it as a porn, and they would actually do pretty well." But doing things the right way costs money, and when you're tinkering with porn as a side project, it's usually money you don't have. r/AIGeneratedPorn's project died because renting server time and running the training was too expensive, according to a post in that subreddit before it went down.

"There is no such thing as ethical use of an AI that uses database images without consent," Chowdhury said.

"How can a tech that at its core has rape videos be anything but a perpetuation of rape culture?" Červenka said. "I don’t think I would sleep well at night if I were [GP], because he's relying on images of abuse to create a Frankenstein's monster."

‘Frankenstein’s Monster:’ Images of Sexual Abuse Are Fueling Algorithmic Porn syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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i-m-sulphur-i-guess · 5 years

Text

The concept of “deserving” and the justice system

At some point of my life I liked to spend my time over watching true crime videos – the solved ones in particular. It seemed fascinating to me to find out about the criminals’ backgrounds and their possible reasons to do what they did. Human minds never fail to impress me with their diversity and flexibility, and I sometimes choose peculiar ways of studying people.

But anyway, everything seemed pretty much okay, until I stumbled upon one case. If you’re familiar with this kind of content, you might know what case I am referencing. Two young boys, about ten years old each, kidnapped a three-year old baby from a shopping mall, then tortured him and killed him. An extremely cruel case, if you ask me, but that is not the point I was getting to. The boys were found, went through the trial, were sentenced to several years of imprisonment and served it in special facility for underage criminals. Then they both were released and given different identities, and one of them kept committing crimes as an adult and going to prison again.

So, I decided to check the comment section under the video. Just wondered what the people were thinking. And oh boy. What a shitstorm. I have never seen such violent comments under any true crime video before, and I was infuriated. Lots of people were absolutely seriously typing that the boys deserved bigger sentences, that their prison conditions were too mild, they needed to be executed, they did not deserve anonymity and they are garbage and a waste of space and oxygen. Basically – that they didn’t deserve to live.

I have been saying for a long amount of time: if you think you have the right to decide, who is worth living and who is not, what makes you different from the murderer? Can you even hear yourself? All of these comment writers, all of these tens of thousands of people who were protesting and pressuring the government back then to punish the two boys harder, cannot see anything above their aggression and desire to punish and suppress. But… that is exactly what criminals do. Suppress and show their power and dominance via hurting, punishing and taking lives.

You might say “yeah, but this is done in return, and they deserve to feel the pain because of how they made their victim(s) feel!” But there’s also a thing that most people forget, don’t think about or prefer to comfortably ignore. No one ever will decide to commit a crime if they’re happy. Whoever does something awful, no matter if it’s a crime or just something painful for other person, is already suffering. No exceptions. Some may not show it or may not understand it themselves, but they are extremely unhappy people. No one does bad things for no reason. And the fact that you, yourself, are offended or triggered, should not make you forget about that, dehumanize the offender and basically be absolutely the same in the desire to hurt.

(Disclaimer: I absolutely do not promote and/or encourage staying in any kind of abusive relationship or letting people face no consequences. Forgiving the person and treating them as a human being does not equal staying around them and forgetting about their actions.)

This whole concept of deserving something is what led our society to the way it is in the first place. It is the reason we have crimes, victims and criminals. Suicides and bullying. Poverty and wars. People become unhappy, twisted and insane because of their lack of love. Because someone has decided that they don’t deserve love for some reason. Because it was established as an extremely old way of control and manipulation, portrayed as “the right way of raising children without spoiling them”. Because generations and generations of unhappy people raised unhappy people, being unable to give them the love they never had themselves. The two boys, in this particular case, were born and raised in extremely unhappy families, and they never saw anything except violence and alcoholism. Nobody cared about them, nobody wanted to help them. And if it isn’t a perfect way to raise someone with an absolutely twisted perception of life, then I don’t know what is. Sure, everyone adapts to such circumstances differently, and some kids don’t become openly violent against others. But when you sow nothing but aggression and unhappiness, you can’t expect to reap anything different.

How can the justice system be called that way, if it brings absolutely no justice most of the time, and just turns away from the source of the problem and gives no real cure? You can’t apply a formula to other people’s grief, you can’t measure guilt and you can’t prevent crimes by fear of punishment. You can’t state what other people deserve or don’t deserve because of what they did or didn’t do, make it a rule and force everyone to fit into it.

I have already described my view on justice “in a perfect world” before, on my other blog, but I’ll try again. In every case, in every crime the biggest thing that matters is the criminal’s background and their desire to change. Every single case should be reviewed individually, without any planned patterns and comparison to other crimes, and there definitely should be no violent sentences. The goal should be not to punish and beat the desire to do wrong out of people, but to offer them a chance to heal. To figure out why they did wrong and what can be done to teach them how to do right. Of course, if the person doesn’t want to change and sees nothing wrong in their actions, they have to be isolated from society until they change their mind sincerely. But again, not to punish, but to prevent more people from being hurt. And I think that even if such system might be tricked and the change in the prisoner’s mind can be skillfully faked despite all the high-tech ways of control and trained psychologists, these cases would still be less frequent than justice system mistakes that we have today.

Because, after all, I believe that everyone in the world is worthy of a chance to be happier. And if everyone was judged only by their past mistakes (that we all have made) – what would have happened to all of us and our lives?..

#rant #serious shit #true crime #please don't beat me you don't know where i live anyway #i should probably add a text cut next time sorry

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

By now, you’ve probably heard the story.

Last week, an actress and photographer, Rosey Blair, asked to switch seats with a woman on a plane from New York to Dallas so that she could sit next to her boyfriend. Blair proceeded to live-tweet as she observed the woman and her new seatmate chat and eventually start flirting, discussing their mutual love of working out and subtly touching elbows, all details captured and posted by Blair. Her thread went mega-viral, racking up 900,000 likes, getting picked up by national news outlets and earning Blair thousands of new followers.

Many initially thought the story was adorable, even if others found it creepy and intrusive. Then the incident took an even darker turn.

An online hunt began to find the identities of the couple, now identified by the hashtag #PlaneBae. The man, a former professional soccer player named Euan Holden, embraced the media circus, but the woman, uncomfortable with the newfound spotlight, hesitated. That didn’t stop the online mob from tracking her down. She began receiving crass, sexually explicit messages in the comments of her personal Instagram profile.

She deactivated her social media accounts and declined an invitation to go on the Today show. Blair and Holden appeared without her. No one asked her if she had any reservations or concerns about being made part of a viral story. All she did was board a plane and chat with her seatmate. Now she is a public figure, a hashtag, and a target. Millions of strangers on the internet want to know about her personal life.

The erosion of the division between public and private has been coming for a while now. Maybe it started with reality television and the dramatic storylines broadcast to millions about people just like you falling in love. (Though those people willingly signed up to become public figures.) Maybe it was already in the works before then: People have always turned other people’s lives into public spectacle regardless of their will.

When I was 22, I wrote my first paid article for a publication on the internet. My essay, written under my own name, was about what it was like to date with genital herpes. I expected maybe a few thousand people to read it on the Women’s Health website; it wasn’t even going in the physical magazine. At the time, I was an intern at a media company, less than a year out of college, and my only brush with fame was as a 13-year-old writer of moderately popular Harry Potter fanfiction.

The herpes article went viral. Not just “few thousand retweets” viral — I mean invitations to go on daytime television viral. Two days after my essay went up on Women’s Health, I was featured in a trending article on the Washington Post website. It was aggregated from there on Yahoo, Jezebel, and eventually even The Daily Mail, where an enterprising staffer tracked down my private Facebook profile and raided it for photographs to use in their article.

There I was, smiling brightly in a picture my mother had taken as my father blew out his birthday candles. Of course, they cropped my father out, leaving me grinning and alone as hundreds of Daily Mail readers wrote comments underneath attacking my character. This slut, this shameful whore. She should kill herself for having an STI.

The next year I would find myself at the center of a new controversy when Genius, a well-funded startup that mostly writes annotations on song lyrics, launched a new tool allowing their users to annotate any website, anywhere. I wrote a blog post detailing why I thought the product was unethical, as it ignored the consent of the website creator and let strangers essentially scrawl graffiti on our intellectual property. I was also concerned it would be yet another tool in the hands of abusers, stalkers, and harassment mobs to come after me on my personal blog; since going viral, I had spent a year receiving horrifying sexual emails from strangers.

Sam Biddle, writing for Gawker, found my case unconvincing. His argument boiled down to my status as a public figure. “It’s brave and noble of Dawson to publicly try to combat the stigma of STD infection,” he wrote. “But when she writes ‘we need more voices to challenge the single narrative of herpes,’ she’s already acknowledging her place in public—it’s right there in the ‘we.’ If you want to advocate for a cause in front of an audience (and judging by the fact that her website has a ‘Press’ section, I’m assuming she does), you have to take what comes with it. Dawson says she has a blog ‘to have total control of how I write and who interacts with me.’ If only this were possible! Unfortunately, this is a fantasy, and will always be so.”

Chelsea Hassler, writing for Slate, argued the contrary position: That as a blogger with a few articles published, I was not someone who rose to the level of a “public figure.” I was an individual, an amateur. She wrote, “There’s a substantive difference between critiquing the work of a professional journalist or blogger and critiquing the writing of an individual who is using her blog as an outlet to communicate with other likeminded people.”

People like me pose a challenge to traditional understandings of the public-private divide. I write about my personal life, and sometimes I get paid to do so. I have fewer than 20,000 followers on Twitter. I’ve had a handful of short stories published in anthologies by indie houses and my blog has steady traffic, but I don’t have a Wikipedia page. Would you consider me a public figure? At what point did I become one? Would it change your mind if I told you I’ve never wanted to be one?

I don’t think there is any such thing as a “private person” anymore. The vast majority of us constantly groom our internet presence, choosing the right filter on Instagram for our brunch and taking polls of our friends about our next Facebook profile picture.

We don’t think about this as a public act when we have only 400 connections on LinkedIn or 3,000 followers on Tumblr. No one imagines the Daily Mail write-up or the Jezebel headline. We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time. Little kids dream of becoming famous YouTubers the same way I wanted to be a published author when I was 12.

But there are also those of us who don’t choose this. We keep our accounts locked, our Instagram profile set to “friends only.” Maybe we learned a lesson when a post took off and left the safe haven of our community, picked apart in a horrifying display of context collapse by strangers who we didn’t intend to speak to. Maybe we are hiding from something: a stalker, an abusive ex, our family members who don’t know our true queer identity. To some of us, privacy is vital.

A woman boarded a plane in New York and stepped off that plane in Dallas. She chatted with a stranger, showed him some family photos, brushed his elbow with her own. At no point did she agree to participate in the story Rosey Blair was telling. After the fact, when the hunt began and the woman took no part in encouraging it the way Holden did, Blair tweeted a video in which she drawled, “We don’t have the gal’s permish yet, not yet y’all, but I’m sure you guys are sneaky, you guys might…” And her followers did not disappoint.

When people called Blair out for this blatant invasion of privacy, she blocked them. Because she, apparently, wanted to control her own boundaries. Later she tweeted about wanting a job at BuzzFeed.

I don’t know what the woman on the plane is thinking or feeling. I don’t know if she’s afraid or angry or mildly amused but inconvenienced. But I know how it feels to see strangers scrawling obscenities on social media accounts and email inboxes you once considered safe, commenting alongside your friends and family members. I know the sour humiliation of knowing everyone in your life can see that strangers have written about you — your parents, your co-workers, your exes.

Even when the attention is positive, it is overwhelming and frightening. Your mind reels at the possibility of what they could find: your address, if your voting records are logged online; your cellphone number, if you accidentally included it on a form somewhere; your unflattering selfies at the beginning of your Facebook photo archive. There are hundreds of Facebook friend requests, press requests from journalists in your Instagram inbox, even people contacting your employer. This story you didn’t choose becomes the main story of your life.

There is no opting-in, no consent form, no opportunity to take it all back. It feels like you are drowning as everyone on the beach applauds your swimming prowess. What do you have to complain about? Why wouldn’t you want publicity?

It’s clear that to Blair, the violation of this woman’s privacy is less important than Blair’s growing platform and ambition. It is not a romantic comedy for the digital age. It is an act of dehumanization.

A friend of mine asked if I’d thought through the contradiction of criticizing Blair publicly like this, when she’s another not-quite public figure too. But Blair is not just posting about her own life; she has taken non-consenting parties along for the ride. While Blair uploads gorgeous Instagram photos to celebrate her body on her birthday (I say this genuinely: You go, girl), the woman on the plane has deleted her own Instagram account after receiving violent abuse from the army Blair created. As the content creator of this media circus, Blair is responsible for the behavior of its fans. When faced with the opportunity to discourage their privacy violations, she has done the opposite: “I’m sure you guys are sneaky.”

You become a public figure the instant that someone else decides you are worthy of interest, even if you are minding your damn business. Maybe you will tweet a joke. Maybe you will squint in a friend’s photograph. Maybe you will yodel in a Walmart. Or maybe you will board a plane.

This essay is adapted from a blog post that originally ran on Ella Dawson’s website.

Ella Dawson is a sex and culture critic whose writing has been published by ELLE, MTV, Women’s Health, and more. Find her at elladawson.com and on Twitter as @brosandprose.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at [email protected].

Original Source -> The dark side of going viral

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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