Google Takes Stand — Against Questionable Content. Will AI Get It Right?

May 24, 2024

This essay is the work of a dinobaby. Unlike some folks, no smart software improved my native ineptness.

The Internet is the ultimate distribution system for illicit material, especially pornography. A simple Google search yields access to billions of lewd material for free and behind paywalls. Pornography already has people in a tizzy but the advent of deepfake porn material is making things worse. Google is upset about deepfakes and decided to take a moral stand Extreme Tech says: “Google Bans Ads For Platforms That Generate Deepfake Pornography.”

Beginning May 30, Google won’t allow platforms that create deepfake porn, explain how to make it, or promote/compare services to place ads through the Google Ads system. Google already has an Inappropriate Content Policy in place. It prohibits the promotion of hate groups, self-harm, violence, conspiracy theories, and sharing explicit images to garner attention. The policy also bans advertising sex work and sexual abuse.

Violating the content policy results in a ban from Google Ads. Google is preparing for future problems as AI becomes better:

“The addition of deepfake pornography to the Inappropriate Content Policy is undoubtedly the result of increasingly accessible and adept generative AI. In 2022, Google banned deepfake training on Colab, its mostly free public computing resource. Even six years ago, Pornhub and Reddit had to go out of their way to ban AI-generated pornography, which often depicts real people (especially celebrities) engaging in sexual acts they didn’t perform or didn’t consent to recording. Whether we’d like to or not, most of us know just how much better AI has gotten at creating fake faces since then. If deepfake pornography looked a bit janky back in 2018, it’s bound to look a heck of a lot more realistic now.”

If it weren’t for the moral center of humanity, Google’s minions would allow lead material and other illicit content on Google Ads. Porn sells. It always has.

Whitney Grace, May 24, 2024

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Censorship, Google, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.