Kickstarter takes offline a crowdfunding project that wants to generate pornography with AI

Kickstarter has stopped a crowdfunding project from Unstable Diffusion because the company first wants to see how to deal with artificial intelligence projects. Unstable Diffusion wants to raise money to develop AI that can generate pornography.

Unstable Diffusion’s project has been at least temporarily suspended by Kickstarter. Everette Taylor writes in a blog post, the CEO of Kickstarter, that the crowdfunding platform has received feedback on projects aimed at generating AI images. Artists in particular are critical of projects that use their art without permission to generate new images.

On the project’s Kickstarter page Unstable Diffusion writes that it wants to train a new AI model with the money from crowdfunding. For this, the company wants to use images from anime and cosplay, photos and images from artists on Artstation, DeviantArt and Behance. In total there are 75 million images on which the Unstable Diffusion model must be trained.

Stable Diffusion’s project had already achieved funded status and raised double the intended 23,000 euros. If Kickstarter maintains the suspension of the project, Unstable Diffusion will not receive this money and backers of the project will automatically receive a refund. Unstable Diffusion believes it is not doing anything wrong and doesn’t break any rules.

Kickstarter seems to think differently. Taylor writes that in this discussion, Kickstarter “always sides with creative work and the people responsible for that work.” According to the CEO, it is important to look not only at situations in which copyright is clearly infringed, but also at situations in which the work of creators is indirectly used without their permission. The platform does ask for users’ opinions, but says nothing specific about Unstable Diffusion’s project status.

Kickstarter is not the first online platform to take measures against AI-generated images. Portfolio platform ArtStation recently added an opt-out feature, allowing creators to exclude their projects from use in AI tools like Dall-E.