Washington's Lottery AI site turned user photo into porn

If it was on anyone's cards, they should win a cash prize. Like a lottery of some sort.

Disgusting! Where?

I mean, they covered her face which is the only part that's actually her. I'm assuming she provided it for demonstration purposes, and her underlying point was that it absolutely can do harm.

To be fair, KTTH is barely news.

Well, the lottery is known as the poor tax, so I guess they're not completely wrong.

It must be intelligent after all!

“I also think whoever was responsible for it should be fired,” she added

Seriously, fire everyone in the chain who had direct knowledge it was going to happen and can't provide documented proof that they said how absolutely insanely fucking awful the idea was.

Image generation is cool technology, and while it (and LLMs even more) is limited and super oversold in terms of what it can do, I'm not anti-AI. But this is fucked up without the sex part.

This site is a complete right-wing boomerbait rag, never pay it any attention.

People think of WA and think of Seattle, then extrapolate. Seattle is really no different than places like Omaha where there is a more liberal, educated populace. They are surrounded by a state full of angry, ignorant people. This "newspaper" is for the angry types.

The "test drive a win" where it would generate AI images of people as lottery winners was a real thing, and they have taken it down.

Only larger news outlet I see covering it is Fox news. They cite the "mynorthwest.com" as their main source, but they do say that they recieved a statement from the lottery confirming that it was shutdown for that reason:

Washington's Lottery confirmed to Fox News Digital that it shut down the site after being made aware of the purported image.

Obviously a lot of people don't like Fox news, but I don't think there's a political agenda where that statement shouldn't be trusted.

My Gen z and millennial friends are shockingly gullible and ignorant.

Idk, Mynorthwest is a real source but it's mostly dull local news fare with a some good event coverage. KIRO is that branch and its okay, its center right, it certianly isn't the cinclair broadcasting station, thats komo 4. 710 sports is more center left but its sports. 770 KTTH where this article seems to be coming from is obviously garbage reactionary conservative radio, but that's what makes money in radio.

It depends - are you Inigo Montoya?

But only four knuckles, so that's nice.

It's a core problem with image generator LLMs. For some fucking reason they seem to have fed them the content from sites that had a lot of porn. Guessing Imgur and Deviantart.

Literally the first time I tried to use MS's image generator, was out with some friends trying a new fried chicken place and we were discussing fake tinder profiles.

So I thought to try it and make a fake image of "woman senuously eating fried chicken".
Content warning, blah blah blah.

Try "Man sensuously eating fried chicken". Works fine.

We were all mystified by that. I went back a few days later to play around. Tried seeing what it didn't like. Tried generating "woman relaxing at park".
Again, content warning. Switch to a man, no problem. Eventually got it to generate with "woman enjoying sunset in a park." Got a very dark image, because it generated a completely nude woman T-posing in the dark.

So, with that in hand I went back and started specifying "fully clothed" for a prompt involving the word "woman". All of a sudden all of the prompts worked. They fed the bot so much porn that it defaulted women to being nude.

My bigger question is WTF is this system even doing? If you win money in the lottery, you can select to apply it to a vacation package if your random draw hits it?

No, it's advertising. They're trying to convince people to play the lottery so they have you roll a (virtual) wheel and upload a head shot then it generates a theoretical video of what it might look like if you went on that vacation (using your theoretical future winnings). It's absolutely idiotic, but their target demographic isn't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed to begin with.

they likely aren’t creating the model themselves. the faces are probably all the same AI girl you see everywhere. you gotta be careful with open weight models because the open source image gen community has a… proclivity for porn. there’s not a “function” per se for porn. the may be doing some preprompting or maybe “swim with the sharks” is just too vague of a prompt and the model was just tuned on this kind of stuff. you can add an evaluation network to the end to basically ask “is this porn/violent/disturbing”, but that needs to be tuned as well. most likely it’s even dumber than that where the contractor just subcontracted the whole AI piece and packages it for this use case

Prior to launch, we agreed to a comprehensive set of rules to govern image creation, including that people in images be fully clothed.

Apparently they thought about it, but neglected to think that some "vacation" images in the training data might not be tagged with the clothing worn or that the model might sometimes consider only pants to be fully clothed because some of the training data might show topless women in public and not be tagged. Or topless men.