DeepCreamPy- Decensoring Hentai with Deep Neural Networks (2018)

https://github.com/liaoxiong3x/DeepCreamPy

by acqbu • 5 years ago

275 112 5 years ago

github.com

cs702• 5 years ago

A new front in the long-running battle between censors and those who oppose censorship.

The use of deep neural networks for this purpose seems inevitable, in hindsight.

We live in interesting times.

marderfarker2• 5 years ago

How do you recover information that is not there? Best you can do is guess what’s supposed to be there.

That’s why I hate watching 4K AI “enhanced” historical films, it is akin to rewriting history.

feanaro2• 5 years ago

I never heard of this before. What kind of enhancing does the AI do?

mayapugai• 5 years ago

Long story short, these algorithms aren't recovering information that was lost. They reconstruct the images by guessing what should've been there. So, you're not violating any information theoretic concept.

But this means the guesses can be incorrect, although the likelihood of that happening can be greatly reduced with good training data.

vmception3• 5 years ago

Only works with color images, so that’s basically limited to fanart and explicit covers, and not the actually manga pages where the censoring appears

Very limited utility

Love the pun in the title

Mumps• 5 years ago

very limited utility

Easily one of the funniest things I've read on HN; as if decensoring _any_ hentai isn't already a hilariously limited use case.

can16358p• 5 years ago

I think the name of the library deserves an award on its own.

hwers2• 5 years ago

Hardly subtle

schleck8• 5 years ago

There is also DeepThroat, the speech synthesis architecture name of 15.ai (was added later on after someone recommended it on twitter)

rg1116• 5 years ago

Nah, that award goes to this project (Hent-AI)- https://github.com/natethegreate/hent-AI

oneepic• 5 years ago

Not to start a war, but Hent-AI is pretty basic by comparison IMO.

hiyer• 5 years ago

Incidentally this depends on DeepCreamPy. From the github readme:

You will need to download and install DeepCreamPy, which is linked in the intro.

bgeeek• 5 years ago

But that name. Ugh.

hooande• 5 years ago

this name is too much. there's a difference between cute and vulgar. no star

marginalia_nu• 5 years ago

To be fair, it's a pretty vulgar application.

goldcd• 5 years ago

shrugs Not to my taste, but you've got to admire somebody so pissed off with pixelation, they've created a project..

I was disappointed at the issues - I'd anticipated there being amusing complaints.

computerfriend• 5 years ago

It's not my thing, but I personally find censorship much more vulgar.

monkeybutton2• 5 years ago

How popular are the censorship laws in Japan? Is it like cannabis where the majority is in favor of legalization but politicians are beholden to a vocal minority? The whole thing seems so dated in the age of the internet. Anyone in Japan can easily access uncensored porn from anywhere else in the world on their phone now. What's the point?

makeitdouble• 5 years ago

Am not super versed in the question, but would wager it’s a matter of who’s willing to go fight the status quo to change the law. Contrary to cannabis, there’s no strong science behind decensoring, nor obvious medical use. The field is already under heavy attacks in a lot of fronts, there would be better battles to fight than this one.

monkeybutton2• 5 years ago

I would argue that using science to prove cannabis/uncensored nips has benefits as an argument in favor of legalization is wrong. One should not start from the position of a thing being illegal and demanding others to argue for its legalization. The correct approach is to start from the position of a thing being legal, and arguing for it being illegal using science. So, has anyone proven using science that censorship has benefits? Reduces porn addiction? Reduces abuse?

toxik• 5 years ago

This is three years old, why is this being reposted now?

high_byte• 5 years ago

the world needs to know

danuker• 5 years ago

Urgently!

Invictus0• 5 years ago

(2018)

gaze• 5 years ago

Imagine putting this on your resume.

vmception3• 5 years ago

Then you immediately pass the culture fit test

DaftDank• 5 years ago

Plot twist: He's applying at Pornhub next, and this gets him instantly hired.

luckman212• 5 years ago

Out of curiosity, how many Pornhub'ers are also here on HN? (I mean employees, not users haha)

delusional• 5 years ago

I think the tone of the interview is going to depend heavily on the first impression. A well rounded person with good personal hygiene would make this seem like a fun and weird project. If the person is a total misfit neckbeard, it's going to be less fun and quirky, and more worrying.

politelemon• 5 years ago

The user colors cencored regions green in an image editing program like GIMP or Photoshop. A neural network fills in the censored regions.

This will have limited use as it would require highly motivated individuals with enough time to go through their collections.

Speculation, also probably won't work with alien/creature hentai of the green skin variety.

mmiliauskas• 5 years ago

Now we know what HN faps to..

nomdep• 5 years ago

    It does NOT work with:
    - Censorship of nipples
    ...

What? Useless!

wiradikusuma• 5 years ago

I heard hentai pictures don't censor nipples, only penises and vaginas. Haven't seen it myself, of course.

micromacrofoot• 5 years ago

you don't need to even go as deep as hentai, you see it in anime (Ghost in the Shell is one prominent example)... it's fairly common to see nipples and a complete lack of genitalia

toyg• 5 years ago

They used to censor nipples too, and then at some point they just didn't. I guess the Japanese government relaxed their guidelines a bit - after all, they've now recognized that manga and anime are effectively their Hollywood, and are very busy promoting them around the globe. I expect at some point they will quietly drop prosecutions of uncensored drawings altogether.

criley2• 5 years ago

This project was deleted by the original author 9 months ago after they were doxxed/compromised potentially in relation to this project. This repo is a copy. The paypal donate link in the readme still goes to the original authors paypal lol.

jptech• 5 years ago

Not the latest on censorship. Couple of months ago someone was arrested for decensoring porn and putting it on their website.[1] With Deepfake and all the latest GANs, anyone can probably do it with an acceptable quality. It's just that the sale and distribution of such material will remain illegal in Japan for the forseeable future.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgdq87/deepfakes-japan-arres...

rg1116• 5 years ago

A man was very recently arrested for decesoring pixeleted Japanese porn with Deep Learning ("AI").

Man Arrested for Uncensoring Japanese Porn With AI in First Deepfake Case - Vice (https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgdq87/deepfakes-japan-arres...)

Note: This is not hentai, but real-life porn.

Whenever I see news like this- I feel like there are a lot of work that can be done in Porn with AI. There are several low-hanging fruits that can be very easily solved. I don't know why no one is working on them.

I guess it would be difficult for people to say that they do AI at PornHub, and it will be hard for people to find work afterwards. Not to mention the ethical implications even when the humans involved fully agree to everything.

hwers2• 5 years ago

Despite the headline, inside the actual article they admit that it wasn't really for uncensoring that he got arrested, but for copyright violation (as well as basically displaying porn in a country where porn is illegal).

rg1116• 5 years ago

In one country, making reaction videos or analysing news with clips from proprietary news channel is very common.

Then came a guy, who used news clips to create Before/After clips of politicians of a certain party. In these clips, the same person would be saying completely opposite things- on camera, and publicly- some years apart. These videos went viral. The party was in power. They forced the news channels to claim copyright to YouTube, and as they were legitimate, YT did take down those videos.

So, yes, when they say that he was arrested for copyright claims- I don't trust that.

zionic4• 5 years ago

Porn and AI

This comment reminds me of a disturbing one I read a few months back on an anonymous underwater basket weaving forum.

The poster was discussing those expensive “real doll” (?) sex robots that creep me out, anyways he went on to mention that he discovered the app “face app” could take these things from “uncanny valley” to essentially photorealistic. Makes sense given what the app is supposed to do, but the real mind fuck was he said it also works on under aged dolls… which again I was surprised to learn are apparently legal most places.

So AI/ML can take an inanimate object and then create highly illegal fool-most-humans level fake image from said inanimate object. Seems pretty scary to me, and we might not be far from an ML model that can essentially produce endless amounts of illegal content.

What are the implications of that? How do you even begin to police/filter that? Then I guess there’s the question of if we even should, since none of it’s real anyways.

Porn and AI is gonna get real messy.

tomerv• 5 years ago

Not sure if I want to get into this discussion... but is underage porn still illegal when it's not technically depicting a real person? And is it moral? I could see it going either way (no child got hurt in the process / but it may push someone with pedophile tendencies towards acting on them / but it could also provide a safe outlet for someone with those tendencies).

MomoXenosaga2• 5 years ago

Feminists are against it because they are afraid it could replace real women. I have to admit that considering the general shittyness of man it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one day we might prefer the companionship of robots. I read Asimov when I was a teen.

cbozeman• 5 years ago

Then I guess there’s the question of if we even should, since none of it’s real anyways.

The idea of "policing" something that isn't even real should be seen as just patently ridiculous to any thinking person.

What comes after that? People love to shit all over the "slippery slope" and call it a "fallacy" even though there's a clear historical record of how the smallest of openings for those in power eventually become handholds, then footholds, until finally, you're living under a tyrannical system.

rg1116• 5 years ago

we might not be far from an ML model that can essentially produce endless amounts of illegal content

Like this [0] one?

And give me enough money, I can get you one that's a lot better. But I don't want to work for a porn company because of not the perceived immorality of porn, but for the horrible things that come with Porn. And I am well past my teenage years to do this with my own time and money.

[0] https://thisvaginadoesnotexist.com/about.html

aeturnum2• 5 years ago

Porn and AI is gonna get real messy.

From a practical standpoint I think it is going to be an unmitigated nightmare: people creating AI revenge porn, fake porn of famous people, etc.

From a legal standpoint, I don't think AI changes that much. People still own their image and while I would support stronger penalties for creating fake media of people, the law protects third parties using your image without your permission. Revenge porn already carries specific penalties in many jurisdictions[1].

I guess there’s the question of if we even should, since none of it’s real anyways.

I absolutely think you should have say over the release and distribution of porn that uses your image. Not because it's wrong to make porn, but because you are impacted by its existence.

[1] I am generally skeptical of the ability of the prison system to deal with these kinds of things, but if we are going to have one I am glad it's included in the list of crimes.

bayindirh• 5 years ago

I feel like there are a lot of work that can be done in Porn with AI.

Well, one of the de-facto test images for image processing belongs to a Playboy model [0], so it looks like a natural evolution in the field.

Actually it's amazing how image processing revolves around sexual imagery.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

taylorius• 5 years ago

Lenna is a great image, they shouldn't retire it. it's only her head and shoulders after all, and she looks great. They should get a good looking male photo too, to balance things up - use them both for testing.

netcan2• 5 years ago

> a lot of work that can be done in Porn with AI.

I think that "can be" is probably and "is being."

Porn generally, has a historical tendency to be a pioneering adopter of media technology. A substantial chunk of early commercial photography was pornographic. Early films. Early ecommerce. Streaming video. Porn is currently the most developed/active niche in VR filmmaking. I would even consider renaissance portraiture a part of the pattern.

In any case, most of "deepfake" that exists currently besides demonstration is pornographic.

rg1116• 5 years ago

I also think the same.

Many things are possible with the AI technology that we have today, right at this very moment that can be used to do things are the most wild things. Some of it would be illegal, some of it would be unethical. Good things are possible, too.

There was a repo on GitHub that contained the JDK environment variables (IIRC) to identify and box Uighurs from CC camera footage. The news made the headlines.

The getting out part was not really intended, I guess. So, imagine- what other wild things are out there in non-public repos.

"AI" is a very bad name, and often seen as synonymous to AGI. And people are either afraid or excited about it. Because much of the public facing content is focused on beyond-human AI. I guess this is because it is easy to get fundings, and there are private propaganda Machines running?

But there are so much that can be done today. Right now. Good things, too. If there are people willing to do it, and people willing to fund it, things are getting done.

AI weaponry is among this. I believe many things are being done that are far away from the public information.

Let me give you an example.

If there is a drone, I guess, it is not hard for mechanical engineers to rig a machine gun to it. Or with $$$ of defence funding, maybe a drone designed to host a machine gun. Then all you need is basically a cheap webcam and a Raspberry Pi to detect any motion, store the coordinates and aim and trigger the gun. When you have an enemy line, you deploy it behind that, and get done with it.

I am sure multiple countries have this today. And this example is among the lowest-hanging fruits of AI weaponry.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

ads and payment as well. One of the first uses of real-time online credit card transactions was payment for the Pamela Anderson / Tommy Lee sex tape.

suifbwish2• 5 years ago

The reason for this is we descend from an unbroken genetic line of creatures for which absolutely nothing else mattered what they did or did not do except that they could procreate healthy offspring. The drive for life to ensure it’s continual survival and evolution takes on all forms and it’s power permeates every other part of life. primatea in all of our wit and charm have become too smart to procreate in some cases by figuring out how to short circuit the drive to procreate through artificial stimulation. In some cases, intelligence can become an evolutionary disadvantage.

warning26• 5 years ago

I believe the issue was not that he was de-censoring per se, it was that he was reselling copyrighted works. That is, he could have been arrested for the same crime even if he was reselling them with no changes.

suifbwish2• 5 years ago

Someone who works in this sort of industry told a friend of mine that they are hired by a company that is contracted to the adult company but the adult company and the contractor company are owned/controlled by the same individuals. This way no one has to list some porn company as their past employer. If this was not done very few people would ever work for an adult company since it would immediately turn man future employers off.

tmp65535• 5 years ago

Here is the first (?) application of deep learning to improve the pornography experience, an Android app called Melondream published in early 2017:

http://driftwheeler.com

Surprisingly, almost 5 years after being published, this app still serves thousands of user sessions per day. That rate continues to slowly grow.

Except for its user interface, the whole app (client and server) was written in Go (https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/mobile/cmd/gomobile).

It uses densenet feature vectors (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06993) to allow "touch-to-search" (ha!) with a fractional norm distance metric (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.23...).

Citation: Discriminative Unsupervised Feature Learning with Exemplar Convolutional Neural Networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.6909).

vmception3• 5 years ago

How does it improve the pornography experience? The description and examples on that website don't make it obvious. The Register article linked seems to help but I really didn't get that from the landing page or example video.

edit: now I understand, it is a continuous slideshow of erotica, and you can tap any part of the image to be taken down a path of similar images. that's kind of cool.

I thought it would have had something to do with decensoring, but nevermind.

Does BlueStacks work on an Apple Silicon machine? I don't have an android device.

scubbo2• 5 years ago

Ah, I remember the terrible coworker who shared this in work-chat within a week or so of being hired. Somehow he stuck around for a couple of years despite continued terribleness (of both the "HR-related" and the "actually-doing-his-job-badly" flavours), then went to Facebook. Good riddance.

0x0nyandesu• 5 years ago

The funny part is everyone I've ever known to be into sex, porn, kink, etc has been not the one doing the sexual harassment in an organization but rather the ones calling out bad behavior.

Subsentient• 5 years ago

Just like the heretics are usually the most deeply principled.

thewarrior• 5 years ago

Because they understand consent a lot better.

scubbo2• 5 years ago

That tracks here. From later conversations with him, he was not actually a hentai enthusiast nor particularly kinky, but was just sharing it "for teh lulz" - whereas I later ran into another coworker that had expressed concern about his behaviour at a kink club.

(There's so shame attached to being unkinky - nothing wrong with being vanilla! Just presenting this as further evidence supporting your position that enthusiasm for kink is generally positively correlated with responsibility and awareness of how your behaviour affects others)

swayvil• 5 years ago

Doesn't work with nipples or anuses.

Is it just a matter of what the NN is trained for?

fork-bomber2• 5 years ago

'Vagina' is not anatomically correct in the context of the description within the github text. 'Vulva' would be more appropriate. Vagina is the internal passage onwards from the vulva and terminating at the cervix. The vagina wouldn’t be visible under normal circumstances, the vulva would.

unbanned• 5 years ago

You significantly underestimate the sexual depravity of your average deep learning enthusiast. Vagina may full well be visible.

fork-bomber2• 5 years ago

Possibly. But not in the average case surely

textcortex• 5 years ago

Finally something that deeplearning is useful for..

GekkePrutser• 5 years ago

I never understood why Japanese porn is so popular with all the sexy bits pixelated. I haven't seen much of it but it reminded me of the covers of 80s porn magazines with big stars over everything.

Not sure why they do it either but I read here it's the law there. Weird.

dormento• 5 years ago

AFAIK it is part of some legal requirement, and the political inertia is against change in this case. Imagine yourself as a hypothetical japanese politician/lawmaker. You most likely don't want to be know as "that guy who fought for uncensoring private parts in adult media".

DeepCreamPy- Decensoring Hentai with Deep Neural Networks (2018)

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