A few days ago, I discovered Neural Blender. It seems reasonable enough. However, it has major bias issues. (I must admit I didn't notice them at first, but then I'm a cishet white man, so it's not surprising a lot initially escapes me. Thank goodness I listen when women tell me things.)
One of which is that the "Aphrodite" option (currently in the beta stage) completely whitewashes the entered text. (Given a description of a Black or Latina woman, it generates a white or white-passing one.) Black men, however, prove no problem for it.
In retrospect, all the women in the images I've generated are very definitely white or white-passing, from my time using it. Even when I specifically enter "Black woman" or "Latina woman" (or a permutation of that phrase), I get a white one.
I tested the other options ("Phoebe" and "Helios", I think they are). They make Black people look like caricatures from old Disney cartoons, or the images are otherwise horribly distorted. That's actually worse than not depicting any Black people.
It's pretty obvious on which side of the "Interracial" porn category/interest the developers fall: Black dicks for white chicks ... (Here's a news flash for those of you who don't know: That whole QoS thing is racist and not flattering if the Q isn't also an S.) It seems the AI for Neural Blender was only trained with porn stars whom are white women or Black men. Wow; what an absolutely biased piece of crap that can't even depict anyone dark-skinned with any degree of accuracy!
Night Café is at least up to the task of depicting different races, with the downside that it tries really hard (no pun intended) to depict SFW content (even refusing to accept certain words in descriptions).
I find this both annoying and offensive, although I am not surprised that the marginalisation of BIPoC continues in AI. It's a typical privileged white person thing to do, but that doesn't make it acceptable or excusable.
Black women are beautiful and PH statistics confirm it! (If you don't believe me, I suggest you find yourself some Skin Diamond porn.)
As for Latinas, "dark skin", "tanned" and associated permutations yield, at best, a milky coffee tone. Ah, all those fictitious/virtual fiery South Americans that can not be envisioned by NB ...
This is not the "dark-skinned Latina woman" for which I'm looking!
Where are the pre-op trans folks? "Chick with a dick" (or however one describes such people to NB) will result in either depictions of vaginal penetration or some very weird/unnatural contortions and/or extra limbs. (There's only so much I can do with the "clone" and "heal" tools short of being a licensed physician. Amputee porn is definitely a thing, but it's not for me.) That's not to say I categorically haven't got any trans results (considering I was demonstrating the Website to a trans friend with the intention of having a bit of light-hearted fun that subsequently went awry). However, such results seem to be merely accidental consequences of an ambiguous/unclear description, rather than a deliberate attempt to produce what the AI was fed. (Out of over one hundred images, maybe six were passable as trans porn not requiring major image manipulation to be believable.)
Since I don't see it myself, possibly because I'm not paying close enough attention (or am not personally bothered enough to register it), I'm just going to quote my friend here and trust them to know what they're seeing:
"Another thing that's obvious is that the images have a degree of unreality to them. The photo-realism is high, but it's as if I'm seeing a typical cishet white man's fantasy women of his wet dreams. That's not exactly surprising, given the prevalence of porn that caters almost exclusively to the male gaze. However, it's more than that. There's just something off about them. It's so weird and unsettling, rather than sexy. To use the wording of the meme, "I cannot fap to this".
Seriously, on what did you train this thing, 'pron' typed into Google Image Search? So not cool!"
All of these questions and none of them are in the FAQ. I do see, though, that NB uses Stripe as the credit card processor. That makes a lot of sense, since Stripe refuses to deal with people from countries with majority non-white populations. Clearly, these folks don't have much (if any) interaction with the world outside their bubble.
I suggest that the developers find Erika Lust's output (or any porn that's actually targeted at women — and I don't mean any old "lesbian" porn, because male fantasies) and do better! The only "neurons" that might be firing in their AI's net seem to be the same ones as when a lot of blood rushes to the head in a man's pants.
More white people only porn, then? Bummer!
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