
Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw - brakmic
https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/
======
niftich
This is absolutely fascinating.

It's mesmerizing to see this NSFW detection applied in reverse, and it's even
more interesting to observe your mind react to the generated images. You can
see the sort-of- _mons pubis_ patterns, the maybe-pubic hair, the perhaps-
breasts and the suspiciously phallic appendages, complete with realistic
colors.

Interestingly, all exposed skin suggests that the training dataset for the
NSFW detection was skewed towards caucasians, given how the synthesized images
are near-completely devoid of skin tones other than light pink. Perhaps this
is a good visual indication of unintentional 'bias' in datasets?

~~~
aab0
It could also reflect what is most distinguishable. Which is easier for a NN
to confidently distinguish: black pubic hair on black skin, or black pubic
hair on white skin? Darker nipples on black skin, or darker nipples on white
skin? etc You're doing gradient ascent on confidence of classification, not
simply trying to find a plausible input, but the _maximal_ input. There's no
reason to expect this to be racially unbiased as there are simple objective
reasons that higher contrast would be useful. (Similarly, I would not be
surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than
Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial
features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black.)

And since Yahoo needs to detect porn of all races and there's plenty of black
porn out there, it would be odd if their porn detector had such a huge gaping
hole in it.

~~~
rmc
> _I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on
> Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have
> more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors
> other than black_

To people who are used to them. i.e. to you.

I'm Irish, and can tell many Irish accents apart. But I've had people from
England not being able to hear the difference between Irish accents, thinking
they all just sounded Irish.

I've literally been in a group of Europeans in Africa, and Africans mixing up
several of the women there, because they were all relatively tall, slim build,
with longish straight brown hair.

~~~
gotchange
That's a classical example of «Outgroup Homogeneity» [1] and I'm surprised
that some people are still making these arguments to support their claims.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-
group_homogeneity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity)

~~~
Chris2048
It's not a classic example until you can establish that it's an example.

------
WhitneyLand
Some of these images and those from similar projects could be in an art
gallery. They _are_ art; provoking original, emotional, responses.

Most people hear about self-driving cars, but not about the fact that machines
have already begun to emulate human creativity in the most intimate way. For a
while, this secret assault on our uniqueness will stay among us.

~~~
santaclaus
> already begun to emulate human creativity in the most intimate way

I'd argue that the creative entity here is @gabeeegoooh. The machine didn't
make the (provocative) decision to synthesize NSFW images - that artistic
stroke was painted by the fingers and mind that coded up the adversarial
neural net.

~~~
wpietri
Definitely. If creativity were merely the creation of interesting images, we'd
have to call nature far more creative than any human artist. The Grand Canyon
is beautiful, but we don't put up a plaque giving the Colorado River credit
for its thoughtful use of form and color.

Calling the neural network creative is like crediting Van Gogh's brushes for
Van Gogh's brushwork. It's a possible use for the word, but it's very
different use than the one normally meant.

~~~
WhitneyLand
Van Gogh's brushes were simple tools used to render a direct expression of his
intent.

These networks are more akin to a child. You teach her to paint, give her
input and feedback. The result may be something emotionally moving that you
could have not even conceived of.

Your opinion and mine are both surely subjective. However, it seems it will
only become more difficult to split the hairs required to argue that machine
learning creativity is fundamentally different from our own.

~~~
wpietri
Brushes are not pure transmitters of intent the way that, say, Photoshop is.
Brushes (and paints and most artistic tools) have an artistic character that
makes its own contribution to the artwork. I also think you ignore the
interplay between medium and artist, the way intent evolves both during the
course of an artist's careeer and during the production of a single work.

I don't think I'm hair-splitting here. Creativity is something conscious
entities do. Once we have conscious machines, they could well be creative. But
until then, the creativity is the artists, even if they are using generative
systems to create art.

And that's nothing new. Every landscape painter and photographer is using a
generative system, nature, to find interesting things worth turning into art.
Giving the neural networks credit is akin to crediting the haystacks rather
than Monet.

More explicitly generative art, where humans set up systems to produce works,
goes back hundreds of years. That interesting patterns can emerge out of
randomness plus systems is obvious to anybody who has played Yahtzee. That we
use more dice and more complicated systems does not change where authorship
lies. Bigger systems may produce more novel outputs, but novelty and
creativity aren't the same thing.

~~~
WhitneyLand
So, in what way would I be wrong if I called _you_ a generative system?

I don't see any connection to consciousness whatsoever.

Imagine in the year 1900 a black box existed with a slot to input paper on one
side and output paper on the other. If all physics papers available at the
time were fed into it, and out popped the special theory of relativity, how is
that not creativity?

~~~
wpietri
You might not see any connection, but it is nonetheless how people use the
word. Human language is mainly about humans and their relation to the world.

If your black box contains Einstein, then yes, it's a creative act. If it
contains an artificial consciousness, then yes, it's a creative act. But if it
contains infinite monkeys typing randomly into LaTeX producing infinite
physics papers, then no, that's not creativity, just the generation of
novelty.

I could call a red rock-face "angry", and I could call a mountain lake
"tranquil". But that's projecting emotional states onto the external world.
Calling dice creative is projecting a cognitive state onto the world. Sure, it
works fine as metaphor. But it's just analogy, not homology.

~~~
WhitneyLand
I've enjoyed your comments, they've helped me clarify my thoughts.

It seems we disagree on what creativity is. I strongly believe
humans/consciousness are not essential elements in it. For starters:

1). No dictionary seems to link creativity and humanity

2). Einstein's insights are considered some of the greatest examples of
original thinking ever, and would not be diminished, or less beneficial to
society, if conjured by a black box.

3). By your definition, a machine could out do a human by a thousand fold in
every possible task and still not be creative. I don't think there's any
precedent or foundation that would make that a tenable position.

~~~
wpietri
Glad to hear it. And I agree that we disagree on what creativity is. As to
your points:

Dictionaries are written by humans. The human is always implied. One way to
tell is by looking at synonyms: inventiveness, imagination, innovation,
innovativeness, originality, individuality. All very huuman words.

If the theory of relativity came from a black box, then sure, it would still
be a good theory, and we'd still benefit from it. That does not make the black
box creative.

Conscious machines could indeed be creative. We are, after all, conscious
machines. But creativity involves a shift in understanding, and nonconscious
machines don't understand.

------
noam87
I am always blown away by how eerily similar these generated NN images are to
the visuals experienced under psychedelic drugs. Moreso than any artist's
depiction (and there have been plenty of those)... they just have the same
"feel". Which of course leads one to the inescapable idea that there is a
fundamental relationship here.

~~~
Scaevolus
Maybe dreams and hallucinations involve your brain running recognition
networks in reverse to generate stimuli?

~~~
Geee
I've hypothesised something like this. Or rather dreams could be generative
based on random input (or random 'memory key frames') rather than real input.
This assumes that mostly what we 'see' when awake is actually generated by the
brain based on incomplete and noisy sampling of the real world.

~~~
wh-uws
This is basically the exact hypothesis of a TED talk I saw by cognitive
scientist Donald Hoffman.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY)

fascinating stuff

------
viraptor
Some of the more abstract images at the beginning really remind me of
Beksiński's paintings. (some NSFW, but good, dark art overall)
[https://art.vniz.net/en/beksinski/](https://art.vniz.net/en/beksinski/)
There's just enough of abstract ideas and randomly included genitalia.

(now I really wish someone did a Beksiński + photos mixer... there's ~240
samples just on that site)

~~~
pault
Holy shit! It's like Salvador Dali, Gustav Klimt, HR Giger, and Frank Frazetta
had a love child and locked it in a closet. Thanks for the link.

~~~
kgabis
A movie called Ostatnia Rodzina (Last Family) about Beksiński family was
recently released in Poland
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfFt9RfO9Bc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfFt9RfO9Bc)),
definitely one of the best movies I've seen this year. Unfortunately I don't
know if it will screen outside Poland and UK.

------
kolokolo
I'll have 2 tickets to the dick concert thanks.

~~~
nothis
Those ones were hilarious.

------
mgraczyk
We're witnessing the beginning of an entirely new form of pornography. I can
easily imaging a XYZ Porn website adding an "Artificial" or "Neural Dream"
porn section.

~~~
Houshalter
Reminds me of [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1004](http://www.scp-
wiki.net/scp-1004)

------
codingdave
They have automated the surrealist movement. Which goes pretty much directly
against the philosophy underlying the surrealist movement. Which the actual
people involved with it would probably approve of, as they mostly all moved on
from it anyway.

------
dsl
This is one of the most disturbing things I couldn't stop reading.

~~~
petercooper
Agreed. These creepy images make me wonder if some neural net-based text
generator could optimize against algorithms detecting both readable English
and scary/traumatic/intense/whatever prose.. and produce mental imagery darker
than any human author has.

~~~
lotyrin
It wouldn't maximize fear response in humans, only in the neural net that
results from the training set.

If we get to where we can simulate human neural nets (and identify the "scary"
neurons) then we could perform gradient descent against those. That's an
interesting concept. I don't know if that's been visited in SF, but it has
potential. Imagine a set of not-so-random squiggles that causes uncontrollable
fear to its beholder.

~~~
Fr0styMatt88
I believe this is actually a possibility now.

So when I was back in high school I was playing around with one of the Kai art
programs (I forget which one actually) that let you generate different
patterns. I couldn't explain why but the patterns that were kind of regular-
ish and curvy/abstract (anything that looked like cells under a microscope or
those with a honeycomb-like structure) made me deeply, anxiously, almost
panic-attack level uncomfortable. This startled me when it happened the first
time. There was nothing at all I could logically connect it to.

The best way I can describe it is that I get that deep stomach-fluttery
feeling that comes with being really nervous and apprehensive, but without any
of the emotional content of anxiety at all.

I forgot about that experience for a long time, until the first Google 'Deep
Dream' images were released. Turns out that the Internet has given this a name
- trypophobia (fear of holes). The regular, not-quite-identifiable quality to
the images is what seems to do it to me.

Even now, my stomach is fluttering like I'm about to go on a scary roller
coaster. Again though, this comes with no emotional panic. I'm not upset by
it, it isn't self-reinforcing like anxiety is. It's just a really odd feeling.
A very strong 'get away from this' feeling.

I've read the hypothesis that this comes from an instinct to avoid danger,
such as beehives and poisonous creatures and that makes a lot of sense (not
totally sure from memory though so I might be getting it wrong; I need to find
the study I'm thinking of).

So I don't doubt that at least for some people it's possible to synthesize
images that provoke a strong physiological response that could make them flee.

~~~
foxhop
I also have trypophobia.

Sort of related: Instead of visually producing fear, you can also do it with
sound.

Research "Binaural beats: Gates of Hades" I literally threw my headphones off
at like 25secs.

I know you could literally mix trypophobia images and Gates of Hades to
produce a waterboarding like response.

~~~
1123581321
Is this the track by I-Doser on Spotify? I listened to it with decent
headphones and it just seemed like ambient noise with some chanting in the
background. Should I have listened to it in a certain setting, or with eyes
closed, or while looking at something?

------
gabrielgoh
By popular demand, I've added more pictures!

[https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/more.html](https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/more.html)

~~~
anentropic
can the process generate hi-res images?

~~~
tripzilch
Seconded! I'd love to have some in really high res (I dunno what for, but I'd
love to take a closer look). However, even medium res would be really cool,
IMO the generated pictures _just_ a tad too low resolution to appreciate
carefully.

Is it a compute/processing power thing? Does it take a lot more time to
generate an image at say 5x resolution?

Also what I wondered about, quite a few of the images seem to have a sort of
"canvas" like texture on them. Any idea why that is? Would a lot of the source
images have canvas textures? Is it an artifact of the algorithm? It kinda
feels like a highpass (edge enhance) filter as well. Or maybe they're just JPG
artifacts?

~~~
gabrielgoh
the artifacts are explained in detail here

[http://distill.pub/2016/deconv-checkerboard/](http://distill.pub/2016/deconv-
checkerboard/)

more compute will enable higher resolutions and less artifacts, but it means
training a bigger GAN

------
MasterScrat
Could this be used to insert a "subliminal" touch to an image?

Eg you make an ad that looks innocent, but that would fool your brain into
thinking it's sexual if you just scan the page containing it?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Is there any evidence such marketing works?

~~~
anonymfus
Advertisement is not only marketing, it's also art. Even if ad agencies will
fail to convince some porn site or condom producer to use such ad to generate
news, they still can create social ad and submit it to advertising festivals.

~~~
jdavis703
Not to mention the potential to generate free press coverage from
"controversy."

------
yoodenvranx
Has anyone ever thought about using all of reddits porn subs for machine
learning? There must be 10s (or even 100s) of thousand of images (kind of)
neatly organized by gender, boob size, ass size, skin color, age, ...

~~~
flashman
Quick plug for my map of NSFW Reddit:
[http://electronsoup.net/nsfw_subreddits/](http://electronsoup.net/nsfw_subreddits/)

~~~
throwanem
Unusable on mobile. In portrait, the sidebar covers everything; in landscape,
it still covers half the viewport, and touch panning works but resets the
position of the graph to what I assume is center or origin on every drag.

Hate to seem harsh, but I felt it worth mentioning, since it's why I'm unable
to give any more substantive feedback on the project.

~~~
flashman
Not at all designed to be compatible with mobile.

------
gomijacogeo
They've figured out how to synthesize OMNI magazine covers.

------
TheGorramBatman
Shoulda called it "Deep Dicks" or something.

------
shahar2k
I would LOVE to see what happens if you feed it clearly NSFW images as the
source, and let the network optimize for SFW instead

~~~
ant6n
It may look surprisingly similar:
[https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-
netw...](https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/why-do-neural-networks-
think-a-panda-is-a-vulture)

------
boxcardavin
Fascinating, I'm curious to see if any of the tech press or even mainstream
press pick up on this. If they do, will they pixelate the sample images??

------
bcoates
I'm seeing Roger Dean (of the Yes album covers) or maybe "Heavy Metal".

Whatever Piaget stage prog rock is, AI has reached it.

------
k_sze
I wonder if it would make it hard to find this project via Yahoo's search
engine. That would be sweetly ironic.

------
posterboy
If the author is reading this, _per se_ means _by itself_ , _on its own_. I'm
not reading _per say_ in its stead for the first time today.

It shouldn't be surprising that many misheard words survived in a time when
there was no widespread frequent exchange of written language and no writing
standards or before that, when hardly anyone could even read. I feel this
severely complicated our languages.

This is slightly on topic as well, because Natural Language processing has to
deal with that now.

going one step further with the nitpicking, just because I am at it, the per-
say (or indeed, per se) is only a filler in that sentence, like _really_ or
_very_ often are, really though.

------
whitehat2k9
"Not surprisingly, the results of the optimization are clearly pornographic."

Just about spit out my food.

------
ris
So what about optimizing NSFW originals to make them appear "SFW"? What would
such a thing look like? Presumably the skin tones would be the first to go.

~~~
tjwei
[https://github.com/tjwei/play_nsfw](https://github.com/tjwei/play_nsfw) I
have some experiments along this line.

------
kapitza
Georgia O'Keefe has already contacted her attorneys...

~~~
supernintendo
I was reminded more of Salvador Dali's work, particularly The Great
Masturbator.

------
calsy
H.R Gigerish.

------
lizzard
It seems possible to put other, not-porn images of people into the hopper and
spit out an endless stream of perturbing, semi-pornographic trolling. That
will probably happen, despite it being an awful idea, and it could even become
commodified.

------
_wp_
The repository is here:
[https://gitlab.com/open_nsfw/open_nsfw.gitlab.io/tree/master](https://gitlab.com/open_nsfw/open_nsfw.gitlab.io/tree/master)

------
eveningcoffee
Is there are a good validation set of subtle examples of something being NSFW
and SFW?

Especially considering that the subject is mostly defined as _I do not know to
how to define it but I definitely know it when I see it_.

------
dluan
OK - does anyone know, how close are we to these trained neural nets passing
the turing test for human creativity? Because I feel like we're going to pass
it in my lifetime.

~~~
throwanem
Hang prints in a gallery and let's find out.

------
sdfjkl
Sometimes the amount of time and effort we waste on enforcing outdated morals
on other people astonishes me.

Still, we get abstract genitals as a side effect.

------
phjesusthatguy3
The output looks like something Harry would have run across going through the
apartments in Silent Hill 2.

------
wodenokoto
i don't see any pictures in the link.

~~~
gabrielgoh
author here, i just realized this site doesn't work on mobile. I used
javascript to generate the tables of images. While I blunder through trying to
fix this, you can view the pictures here

[https://gitlab.com/open_nsfw/open_nsfw.gitlab.io/tree/master...](https://gitlab.com/open_nsfw/open_nsfw.gitlab.io/tree/master/nsfw)

~~~
erlehmann_
Why exactly are you using JavaScript here and not a simple HTML table or list?

~~~
Houshalter
I imagine he was trying to save time by writing code that makes the tables,
rather than manually making them.

------
triplesec
Perhaps predictably, Facebook is censoring the URL by refusing to let you post
it.

------
pweissbrod
Seems to have bugs. I dont understand whats NSFW about Ted Nugent at a rock
concert

------
spot
similar results using a smaller set of inputs, 20 years ago:
[http://draves.org/fuse/](http://draves.org/fuse/)

------
jlebrech
so this could be used for an automatic nudity free chatroulette

------
sgnelson
Talk about "...You'll know it when you see it..."

------
h4nkoslo
Very HR Giger esque. Somehow more horrifying than the original.

------
pearjuice
So that's what they are doing at Yahoo these days.

------
egypturnash
It's... it's a robot Dali Giger.

I love living in the future.

------
Taniwha
ah ... so it doesn't dream of doggies then .....

