00:00:23.080and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:28.600I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:00:32.200Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:00:39.740These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:00:43.580Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:00:51.200If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:56.920Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:05.580Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:03:47.140How did this become something that you were interested in pursuing professionally and really
00:03:51.700thinking about? Early in my college career, I became really, really interested in AI. And we
00:03:58.260talked about like Brave New World and all of the different robotic developments and stuff in some
00:04:03.940of my classes. And I started to write essays criticizing basically how technology perpetuates
00:04:09.620violences against certain communities, how lack of regulation also perpetuates violence and so on
00:04:16.620and so forth. And so when it came time to pick my senior research project, as well as my electives,
00:04:21.980all of them were centered around algorithmic development and addressing implicit bias in AI
00:04:26.760and also making AI more accessible if it's going to be used, despite the fact that it has extreme
00:04:34.540and what I feel at this point in time, very irreparable flaws. What first went through your
00:04:41.160mind when you wake up in the morning and you see all these people on social media have fed their
00:04:47.040images to this app where they are getting these ai generated cartoon renderings of themselves like
00:04:54.580what were you like uh hate to be a debbie downer guys but uh this has some issues so it was kind
00:05:01.280of multifaceted because one like i said a lot of my research is about addressing implicit bias and
00:05:06.400And 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 criminalization and so on and so forth.
00:05:19.540However, I think that there, like I said, there's a lack of regulation as is.
00:05:26.600And so I don't even think that AI is in a place where it should be allowed to function the way that it does.
00:05:32.360And 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 of the next couple of days, I just started doing research and like really digging into what people were actually branding.
00:05:52.960And I belong to a couple of different AI development groups, even an AI art development group where people are generating art using prompts.
00:06:01.060And I think that that's very different than using your photos to generate images on apps like this one.
00:06:07.380And so as a result, I started talking about it on my close friends on Instagram.
00:06:13.680And I was just like, this is pretty crazy.
00:06:14.920I think that people should stop using this app.
00:06:35.120And I still think that it's very chaotic.
00:06:39.660There's a lot of people who are mad over this Twitter thread.
00:06:42.460And I don't even think it's that deep.
00:06:43.620I think it's literally just me sharing information that you can find doing basic research.
00:06:48.200And if you decide to Google things, people oftentimes jump on a bandwagon and don't do any reading. And I feel like 30 minutes of reading in this case, it takes people so far or so much further than they are because they've taken it for face value.
00:07:02.180Most people who are interacting with the suite didn't even read the terms of service.
00:07:06.320And so that creates a whole nother question as to how seriously people take their data privacy and how people interact with different apps on social media and which one or different apps and which ones are worth engaging in and which ones aren't versus what's the return on investment or is there a return on investment overall when you're using these apps?
00:07:26.540Oh, God, that's such an interesting point.
00:07:28.140First of all, we are big proponents of reading those terms in service. If they are difficult for your average person to understand, if they're not a lawyer, there might be some reason for that.
00:07:41.600And also, I think your point about return on 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 on investment being able to be part of that, being able to do what their friends are doing and being part of a trend.
00:08:06.360And so I think even the inclination to just stop and be like, is this, 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 risks 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.
00:08:32.580I 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.
00:08:52.140However, 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 image is or is using it to basically broaden and train their AI and as a result eventually sexualize or violate the person whose image is.
00:09:22.140it is. I just think that the return on investment is very different. I don't see what the purpose
00:09:26.820of paying somebody to violate you or to take your intellectual property is personally. And I know
00:09:31.600that we give up plenty of information by being on, like I said, these other apps. So this is not an
00:09:35.760endorsement of them at all. But I think that if you're going to use something, at least have a
00:09:39.260reason. Besides, it looked cool. Yeah. So what are some of the ethical issues involving using
00:09:46.660apps like lensa to do this kind of ai generation um so some of the biggest things that i noticed
00:09:52.780like particularly were one the fact that when we're talking about in the world of like me too
00:10:01.180or in the world of protecting ourselves against sexual assault and violation and that kind of
00:10:05.580stuff the conversation around revenge porn is a really important one in this case when you think
00:10:10.500about the lack of legislation around ai and you think about how somebody can upload any image
00:10:15.580because there's no filter on there that says, hey, you can't upload this.
00:10:20.280It makes it easy for AI renderings of naked bodies to happen.
00:10:24.460And somebody could absolutely use that to blackmail or harass somebody who they've been involved with in the past.
00:10:32.920And I mean, this isn't something that's new. People do this with deep fake technology already.
00:10:37.240And so when you think about an app that's readily available at everybody's fingertips,
00:10:41.080it doesn't require you to have special knowledge like deep fake does.
00:10:43.880you think about the danger that that perpetuates in the door that that opens for people to be
00:10:49.640violated and to be exposed in ways that they didn't consent to and so I think consent is a
00:10:55.480really big portion of this also the sexualization of people's images at the hands of linsa itself
00:11:01.060like the fact that people can submit headshots and it return images with boobs or with no shirt
00:11:08.820on or that kind of assumes somebody's proportions or whatever the case may be, creates a whole
00:11:14.700different problem because nobody can sense into that.
00:11:17.000And since that's the property of Linza based on their terms and conditions, those images
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00:15:38.880Back in 2016, Microsoft introduced an AI chatbot called Tay to Twitter.
00:15:44.840Tay's engineers trained Tay to have a basic grasp of the English language.
00:15:48.480It was meant to learn from the internet.
00:15:50.640And eventually, the plan was for Tay to sound like the internet,
00:15:54.040using quick memes and jokes and internet references,
00:15:57.060to be, as Microsoft said, the AI with zero chill.
00:16:02.080But just a short 16 hours after Tay was introduced to Twitter,
00:16:06.560Tay started tweeting inflammatory things,
00:16:09.240like, according to the engineering and tech magazine IEEE Spectrum,1.00
00:16:13.280I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell.1.00
00:16:17.080Or Bush did 9-11 and Hitler would have done a better job.1.00
00:16:21.300Azaria says that this is a good example of what happens when everybody can have access to certain AI tools.0.71
00:16:27.620You 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.
00:16:38.420I mean, you can look back at just the stability of AI itself all the way back to Microsoft's Tay and how Tay got on Twitter and went on a racist and homophobic rant without prompting and was like using slurs and ableism and a whole bunch of other things several years ago.
00:16:54.840And there was no way to check that. And I mean, they had to pull it, but they had to do a lot of cleanup for the rhetoric that Tay was spewing.
00:17:03.180You 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.
00:17:23.780And 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?
00:17:35.400I think that one of the most interesting things about this whole Twitter thread is probably the fact that when I talked about how somebody could upload your nudes, somebody said, you're focused on the wrong thing.
00:17:51.980And 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.
00:18:00.060And then there are 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.
00:18:11.040And I mean, we already see with deepfake the influx in like deepfake porn and that kind of stuff and how that's been used to blackmail people.
00:18:18.280And 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 the consent of users.
00:18:38.260like all of the women that have posted talking about how they didn't consent to being
00:18:42.080naked and that's what they got back from linsa should be alarming to people it should be it
00:18:48.960should be completely alarming but instead there are people who are dismissing it as well it's
00:18:53.900just imagination it's just ai and then we're not even going to talk or i mean we can talk about
00:18:58.700the intellectual property rights violations that comes in when we're talking about how
00:19:02.600there's so many different artists who would be willing to do portraits for people that are
00:19:07.800accurate and ethical for reasonable prices but instead you can kind of think of lensa as the
00:19:15.100fast fashion of self-portraits people want fast and accessible without thinking about the
00:19:20.420implications or the harms and so it directly benefits them so they don't they don't think
00:19:24.640about how it impacts anybody else down the line or how it'll even impact them down the line because
00:19:29.220immediate gratification is what they're seeking yeah one i saw somebody uh tweeting about how
00:19:35.060when they used the Alensa app, it generated very realistic imaginings of her breasts.0.71
00:19:42.460And she was like, I didn't consent to have this be what's happening.
00:19:48.120And I think even beyond things like nudes, something that I noticed is that the AI really
00:19:53.940created these images that adhered very traditionally to standard beauty standards.
00:20:02.520So, like, they lighten skin tones, they slim noses, 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?
00:20:15.920Because 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 like very conventional attitudes 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.
00:20:42.940So I think that 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 bias 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.
00:21:00.040So the hypersexualization of women, that's because most likely the person training these algorithms is somebody who's looking for hypersexuality.
00:21:09.200Like, if they are, if they're inputting images of women that look promiscuous, of course, it's going to regurgitate that.
00:21:17.420Like, 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,
00:21:26.720it's going to try to do its best to emulate those images while also trying to stay true,
00:21:31.820allegedly, to what the original image looked like. But most of the time when you see Black
00:21:36.100people who have used it, their skin is significantly lightened or their hair texture
00:21:40.380has changed or a lot of different things. And so it's not in alignment with people's actual
00:21:46.400characteristics, which I think is also really weird because why would you want to pay for
00:21:49.540something that people have repeatedly told you doesn't give accurate renderings of yourself
00:21:53.400and you're wasting your money and I just I don't get that one either but more importantly I think
00:21:59.000that if we're going to talk about how this is regulated and how this app itself perpetuates
00:22:07.400like all of the modern stereotypes of what people look like then we have to talk about
00:22:11.640implicit bias and how it's inherently anti-black and ableist and anti-trans and a bunch of other
00:22:19.160things all within like the conversation of what the biases of these algorithms are I think that's
00:22:25.560probably the simplest way to put it is that this is a much deeper black hole than just like the
00:22:32.200twitter thread it's so much deeper than that and it requires so much more conversation and
00:22:37.920critical understanding and I think the other thing is people don't believe that reading is
00:22:41.980fundamental like if people picked up a book or or googled for five minutes they could find out
00:22:48.300all of the information they needed to tell them why this was a bad idea but they don't they see
00:22:55.200a trend and they hop on the bandwagon and don't think about what it means for them and then they
00:23:00.440act shocked or surprised afterwards like oh nobody told me or they label people who bring up these
00:23:06.120conversations as luddites who are anti-technological development and that kind of stuff and i think
00:23:12.740that that's ridiculous as well because most of the people who are critiquing this are people who
00:23:16.260are in the industry more after a quick break hey i'm ruby car the host of the podcast encore check
00:23:30.400out our brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak
00:23:36.240heated rivalry join me as i go behind the songs that brought shane and ilia together i'll tell
00:23:41.840you the stories of vice my moon my man wolf parades i'll believe in anything and tattoos all
00:23:47.200the things she said and how they all became a part of this global phenomenon stream encore on
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00:25:35.360Something 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 AI and the way that it is being used to cause harm.0.92
00:25:52.760Like 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?0.97
00:26:04.020I 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.
00:26:11.660I think that in a field like electrical engineering, for example, when there's less than 3% of us in the field, oftentimes we are doing the legwork.0.96
00:26:23.280We are talking about the anti-Blackness.0.99
00:26:24.920We are talking about the hypersexualization of Black women.
00:26:28.140We are talking about the miscategorization and the other biases that are present.
00:26:32.040And 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.
00:26:38.200So 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.
00:26:45.700And 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.
00:26:56.940And then when I provided evidence of this, he tried to gaslight me and tell me that it was made up evidence until all of a sudden he decided it was good research.
00:27:05.100And 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.0.84
00:27:12.100And so I think that oftentimes black women are expected to be like the mules.0.66
00:27:17.300We're supposed to do all of the heavy work and then somebody else gets the gratification, somebody else gets the credit.
00:27:21.740And I think that's true across all different disciplines in life.0.98
00:27:26.100It's just like a lot of times Black women are the trailblazers, especially as the most0.69
00:27:29.460educated or college educated demographic in the nation.
00:27:33.180We are oftentimes sought out to provide the knowledge, but then not credited or given
00:27:40.680the resources in order to expand on our knowledge sets because we've given people what they
00:27:45.640want and they've milked us for what we have to offer.
00:27:47.560And then they think that they can discard us.
00:27:49.940I think that that's so, I mean, who gets the credit is also who has the power, right?
00:27:55.060And so you're your professor being like, no, no, no, that doesn't exist.
00:27:58.620And then when he feels sufficiently like it does exist, oh, now I'm going to write my own paper about it.
00:28:04.160And so that I'll get the credit for pointing out something that I spent the last couple of weeks gaslighting you about saying doesn't exist.
00:28:09.800You know, it's like that is clearly a push pull about who has power, who has legitimacy.
00:28:17.340And that matters so much in these fields.
00:28:20.280It definitely does, especially when you have to lobby for a seat at the table in the first place.
00:28:24.900It's just like AI within 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.
00:28:34.540And so you have organizations like the Algorithm of Justice League that are working tirelessly, which was also founded by a Black woman.
00:28:40.980um you have um what else you have ajl you have black and ai and a whole bunch of other different
00:28:50.180orgs that are trying to bring attention to the ethical imbalances that are present within ai
00:28:54.900and development and the work is taken and people celebrate it however oftentimes the people who
00:29:01.960are behind the work are overlooked and i don't think that there's really ever space for
00:29:07.420conversations around this unless we're creating the conversations ourselves which is pretty
00:29:11.820terrible and not all not all that encouraging and so I think that now more than ever this is when
00:29:20.980the black women who are in the field to really have to rally around each other and rally around
00:29:24.760our youth in order to develop a wave of people who are equally as passionate and equally as0.96
00:29:31.440qualify to create the ripples in this industry because nobody else is going to do it if we're
00:29:37.860not facilitating the conversations. A fucking men. Are there alternatives for folks who might1.00
00:29:45.080be interested in checking out AI and like AI arts, but doing so in a way that might be safer
00:29:50.900or less harmful or might have less ethical implications?
00:29:54.060i personally will not list any other apps because i feel that there's risks associated
00:30:04.760with all of them and like everything i mean every app that we use has a risk but i'm not
00:30:10.120necessarily here to endorse any ai based art generator i would encourage people to learn
00:30:16.420about building algorithms themselves learn about how to input something and get an output on your
00:30:22.080own as opposed to trusting a system and handing over your data to somebody else. There's plenty
00:30:26.700of beginner algorithm development workshops and different tutorials that you can access online
00:30:35.460that you can do on your own. And I encourage people to learn the fundamentals of it actually
00:30:40.900before trying to get results that they can post on social media. That's just me personally.
00:30:45.160I know that people in the thread did list some of their like ideal creations. I think that
00:30:50.380apps like mid-journey that people are using for
00:31:18.860It's understanding bounding boxes simplistically, 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 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.
00:31:46.620I 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.
00:31:56.240And 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.
00:32:08.120Yeah, I will say about the you brought up the intellectual property rights issues. I did see a couple of the lens generated images where if you looked real close in the bottom corner, you would see a watermark or like a like a signature.
00:32:22.360And so we have this idea that, oh, this is just being generated by a computer artist robot 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 AI art.
00:32:41.520aren't you? Absolutely. And I think that that's another big thing right now is that a lot of
00:32:45.540artists are fighting for their rights to their own images after their artwork has been fed into
00:32:51.120the AI generators and the generators are producing something that's a little bit more enhanced.
00:32:56.160And then people are publishing it and selling it as their own. And the original artist isn't
00:33:01.780getting any of their credits and is being robbed of their IP and their copyright because, well,
00:33:07.720AI generated it. And so they're allowed to evade responsibility for infringing on that person's
00:33:13.100work. That's another problem that I think correlates to all of this is that the output
00:33:19.020images technically don't have owners. Like, yes, the app owns it, but there's no individual person
00:33:26.520that gains rights over these images. And that means that there's no identity associated with who
00:33:32.140maybe train the ai to turn like people's images into nudes or who input somebody's nudes into
00:33:41.200these images or publish them accordingly i think that it allows people to dodge responsibility a
00:33:46.760lot and it violates other people who are actively trying to establish themselves because they're
00:33:55.080passionate about real art because people want to participate in a fad that doesn't really have any
00:34:01.360net benefit besides fast images, but I don't understand why people would want images that
00:34:07.420violate the rights and violate ethics. How can folks get a better understanding of AI?
00:34:15.760I just encourage people to read books. And if you want to learn more, read. I think that there's so
00:34:23.280many different studies that are out right now. So many different people have been screaming at the
00:34:27.540top of their lungs how we have to be cognizant of the ways in which ai is used and how we propagate
00:34:34.800it in society and a lot of people have not done the reading and are mindlessly participating in
00:34:40.480different social media trends without understanding how they perpetuate the harms that they claim that
00:34:44.860they want to mitigate whether it be child pornography or different industries that
00:34:50.820infringe upon the rights and autonomy of other people i don't think that people
00:34:54.320are paying acute attention to how they are exacerbating these problems. And so when we
00:35:00.920facilitate a conversation around that, and when we are intentional about learning about these
00:35:05.240things, I think that it creates a more safe interaction with AI. I won't say it makes AI
00:35:11.940a safe place because I don't think that that exists at this time, but it does make our
00:35:15.980interactions with AI a little bit safer. Well, I'm so glad that you're out there
00:35:20.980like poking everyone to be a little bit more informed and asking the questions to make this
00:35:26.700very, very powerful technology a little bit more ethical. Is there a place where folks can
00:35:33.720follow all the work that you're up to? So I have a tech Instagram that I'll be posting
00:35:39.960kind of like this thread and continuing this conversation on. It's called Polyphacology,