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Notes -
I've not seen these videos, though I recall maybe 5ish years ago, there was a minor hubbub when some YouTuber brought this kind of thing to attention, and I watched a few of them which are probably similar to what you described in this post.
In any case, this quoted paragraphs touches on a common sentiment I've seen all over the place, which I still don't fully understand. Which is the notion that these images being on some pervert's HDD is somehow harmful to the subject of the original image. At best, I could see the argument that if the subject were acquaintances with the pervert, then the pervert's perception of the subject would be corrupted in an unfair way, but even that seems like a stretch. For strangers online, I'm not sure how to rationalize this; how does an arrangement of pixels that looks like me harm me if it's sitting on a HDD somewhere that I don't know, viewed by someone I've never heard of, and using it just to get his rocks off (most likely)?
With AI generation, I think a more generic fear exists that we don't know how insight AI will be able to gather in the future from this data, so there's a bit of an unlimited downside risk, but in terms of, say, modern diffusion models, I'm not sure there's anything that harms the subject either. Without intentional training, the model won't be able to recreate the subject's appearance based on their name, so there's just about no risk in terms of privacy. And if the training using video featuring the subject's face causes the model to, by chance, recreate the face, then it's just going to be one of umpteen anonymous faces the model generates. And if perverts generate grids of pixels using AI that look similar to the subject (by chance in this case of modern AI, but conscious intent wouldn't change anything), for the purpose of getting their rocks off while viewing the image, I don't see how the subject would be harmed.
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