Yeah, but their hands are probably all mangled.

It seems whenever a technological breakthrough occurs in artistic media, porn peddlers are among the earliest of adopters, whether it’s the peep shows that predated modern cinema or the earliest carving from 43,000 years ago being the suggestively curvaceous Venus of Hohle Fels.

▼ Hubba, hubba…

It turns out that generative AI is no different, and though many of the leading companies offering such services put restrictions on content with graphic sexual situations, porn always finds a way. As a result, legal history has been made in Japan with the nation’s first-ever arrests related to AI-generated pornography.

On 14 April, a group of four men and women with ages ranging from their 20s to 50s were arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and charged with distribution of obscene images. They are all accused of training a free online AI image-generating tool with “data of a woman’s body” and getting it to produce sexually explicit pictures of naked, non-existent, and non-copyrighted women using prompts such as “spread legs.”

That in and of itself is not necessarily a crime and neither is selling posters of them through online auction sites as the suspects are accused of doing. Where they ran into trouble was by not blurring or mosaicking out the generated women’s naughty bits of data, as required by Japanese law.

▼ Oh, that reminds me…

According to the police, some posters were being advertised as censored but upon delivery were uncensored. Most of the items were sold for a few thousand yen each and one of the accused is said to have made about 10 million yen (US$70,000) from it since October of last year.

In online comments about the news, there was a lot of debate about the relevancy and effectiveness of Japan’s censorship laws in the modern era, and some pondering of who would pay money for an AI-generated pin-up girl.

“There are people who upload uncensored images to social media. Does that not count as distribution?”
“Once you get used to it, you can tell something’s AI at a glance. Are there really people who would pay money for it?”
“Since they were using AI anyway, they could have taken a second to ask it about legal grey areas and safe areas. I often do that when selling things online.”
“I just feel bad for the people buying this stuff.”
“They may say these women don’t exist but they are based on images or real women and slightly changed.”
“First of all, there are only a few countries that criminalize uncensored nudity. Anyone can find it on the Internet anyway, so these laws are useless. I think people struggle to contemplate if it’s really a problem to enjoy parts of the human body.”

There really doesn’t seem to be much sense in upholding these censorship restrictions in this day and age. On the other hand, that law has been in place so long, it seems as if lifting it could result in a deluge of pent-up uncensored content hitting the market all at once. It’s like all that content has been held up for so long and is aching, throbbing, pulsing, and just yearning to explode all…

Well, I better stop before this article gets censored.

Source: The Sankei Shimbun, My Game News Flash
Featured image: Pakutso
Insert images: Wikipedia/Ramessos
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!