Recent comments in /f/technology

marketrent OP t1_ja0r9to wrote

Excerpt from the linked content^1 by Melissa Heikkilä:

>The popular AI image generator Midjourney bans a wide range of words about the human reproductive system from being used as prompts, MIT Technology Review has discovered.

>If someone types “placenta,” “fallopian tubes,” “mammary glands,” “sperm,” “uterine,” “urethra,” “cervix,” “hymen,” or “vulva” into Midjourney, the system flags the word as a banned prompt and doesn’t let it be used.

>Sometimes, users who tried one of these prompts are blocked for a limited time for trying to generate banned content. Other words relating to human biology, such as “liver” and “kidney,” are allowed.

>Midjourney’s founder, David Holz, says it’s banning these words as a stopgap measure to prevent people from generating shocking or gory content while the company “improves things on the AI side.” Holz says moderators watch how words are being used and what kinds of images are being generated, and adjust the bans periodically.

>The firm has a community guidelines page that lists the type of content it blocks in this way, including sexual imagery, gore, and even the 🍑 emoji, which is often used as a symbol for the buttocks.

>Some terms relating to the male reproductive system, such as “sperm” and “testicles,” are blocked too, but the list of banned words seems to skew predominantly female.

>The prompt ban was first spotted by Julia Rockwell, a clinical data analyst at Datafy Clinical, and her friend Madeline Keenen, a cell biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

^1 Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, 24 Feb. 2023, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/24/1069093/ai-image-generator-midjourney-blocks-porn-by-banning-words-about-the-human-reproductive-system/

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Prestigious_Push_947 t1_ja0pzke wrote

Okay, so you misunderstand what encryption in transit, E2EE or HTTPS are, got it. You know the words, but you don't actually understand any of them. E2EE is by definition encryption in transit. It is encryption from end to end, between two ends, whilst transiting between them. All E2EE is encryption in transit, though not all encryption in transit is E2EE.

HTTPS is just a kind of encryption in transit that protects HTTP traffic while it moves over the wire. There are lots of other protocols that provide encryption in transit for other cleartext protocols. You can even have multiple different ways to provide encryption in transit for different protocols. Signal provides encryption in transit for message traffic, and it only provides encryption in transit. It does not provide other types of encryption (i.e. encryption at rest) for your messages.

You don't understand the proposal, you don't understand even the very basics of any of this.

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gramathy t1_ja0ph9n wrote

Not exactly, google offers the ability to target a demographic and this group selected this group.

Now, whether google should allow targeting this group? If they just targeted pregnant women that seems like a valid demographic as they're going to have specific needs that a company would want to advertise to. Targeting people seeing an abortion though...that's going to bring out the worst.

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