Salad, a cloud computing and AI tech company, is renting high-end graphics cards found in gamers’ computers and using all that power to create AI-generated pornography. In return, the gamers who lend the company their GPUs are paid in Fortnite skins, Minecraft cosmetics, Roblox bux, and other gaming-related gift cards and rewards.
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AI-generated images, text, and video are the hot thing right now in the tech world, and every company is rushing to tap into what it sees as the next big goldmine. However, generating all this content isn’t cheap or easy. It takes a lot of money, electricity, and resources. So Salad, a cloud computing company founded in 2017, has started offloading the work onto gamers and their souped-up, powerful PCs. It makes sense; gaming PCs are often very powerful and can be used to generate AI content offsite. And in exchange for renting out their GPUs to make a lot of AI porn, gamers get some gift cards and skins.
As reported by 404 Media, Salad doesn’t obfuscate the fact that, yes, if you let them use your GPU, it will likely be involved in generating porn. As the outlet noted, when users sign up for an account with Salad, they are given a chance to opt out of producing explicit, adult content.
In the official Salad Discord server, some mods reportedly claimed that everyone is, by default, opted out of generating pornographic images and text. They also claimed that some users can’t opt in because of laws against porn in their respective countries. Apparently, some users were worried about not making as much if they opt out of AI porn. According to Salad’s website, users who don’t generate porn will likely “earn a little less” if adult content demand goes up, but added: “We don’t plan to make those companies the core of our business model.”
Interestingly, Salad Discord mods explained that any Stable Diffusion image generation job is automatically categorized as “adult content.” Salad didn’t explain to 404 Media why this was the case, but 404 speculated that the company can’t see what images its users are generating using its tech. Because most generative AI models are used to produce porn, they are just playing it safe and marking all of these image jobs as “adult content.”
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So what do you get for letting Salad control your GPU and create all this AI-generated porn? Well, while the company does track how much you earn in dollars, you don’t get paid directly in cash. Instead, users can spend that “money” to buy digital goods from the Salad store. In here you’ll find a variety of gift cards and digital items, most of which are video game-related.
Poking around, I found items related to Minecraft, Valorant, Roblox, Fortnite, League of Legends, PlayStation, Xbox, Discord, and Twitch. You can also buy Visa and PayPal gift cards, as well as pre-paid food delivery gift cards.
While it’s unknown if any of the AI porn being generated via rented gamer GPUs is non-consensual—for example, if explicit images of Taylor Swift are being created—it’s certainly possible. One of Salad’s clients is Civitai, a platform that lets users share AI models and create images on its site. As reported by 404 Media, Civitai previously allowed users to generate non-consensual porn. There was also an incident where another company that generated AI images for Civitai stopped working with the service after it created what “could be categorized as child pornography” for some users.
Because of this spotty track record, it’s possible Salad users are unwittingly generating non-consensual porn. It’s not the first time we’ve seen AI generation tools be used for questionable creations.
And as is usual with AI nonsense, nobody wants to be transparent about any of this stuff anymore because the numbers are too big and the stakes too high. Neither company would tell 404 Media how many images Salad is generating and providing for Civitai. So we don’t know for sure, but yeah, it’s very possible someone got a Batman skin in Fortnite after generating some non-consensual AI porn. Welcome to the future. It sucks.
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