For the past few months the LLM community are excited with the advent of mergekit that allow the merging of LLM. The paper that introduced this method for LLM failed to mention that there is another – albeit non academic – community that did not wait for this paper to merge machine learning models: StableDiffusion finetuning hobbyists, specifically on the website CivitAI.

Most researchers never took interest in theses communities even though they play a significant role in pushing the research and getting people in machine learning. I'm sure the academic world could greatly benefit from keeping an eye on what they are up to. This article is a tribute to theses ethically questionnable communities.

CivitAI

CivitAI is a model sharing website that allow users to share their finetuned model of StableDiffusion. This way you can find models trained on specific artistic styles or optimized to have realistic results. The website ALLOWS for Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content, so if you decide to take a look for yourself be prepared to encounter many naked, big brested anime girls. Amongst this turmoil, some users decided to create the ultimate hentai model by merging multiple existing models. Sounds familiar?

Their task turned out to be so successful that at the time of writing this article, the stable diffusion model that yields the best results for anime style is a merge of different models, including NSFW. Now we face a very strange problem where all the models that we ave are heavily biased towards nudity, which, you might consider a bug or a feature depending on what you are working on. Reddit user PRNGAppreciation looked into this issue and compared latent hornyness of popular anime style models on the website:

I used to use AnythingV5 quite a while ago and clearly noticed the biases. I since moved to Dreamshaper4 for my go-to model when Bernat intruced me to it on https://wtfood.eu/about/, and the difference is really noticeable.

PonyDiffusion

One of the model that emerged from the CivitAI community is PonyDiffusion. The model what first created by member of the MyLittlePony (MLP) community and trained on MLP fan art. The model quickly became the most popular model on CivitAI.

PonyDiffusion is a interesting example for a few reasons, besides from its curious origin the author often writes blog explaining their work and approach. Notably they spent multiple weeks straight scoring >30k images by hand to teach the model human preferences.

The author of pony diffusion ranted on CivitAI on the response they got from the Stability team.

"At the heart of the issue, they appear to dismiss Pony as merely a (perhaps low-effort) niche-focused fine-tune, and they seem uninterested in my technical efforts."

With the recent release of StableDiffusion3, this tendency from Stability is even more clear, the model trainers will now be held responsible for every image generated by the model, which is a huge liability for CivitAI. While there is no new and more permissive licence, CivitAI is banning SD3 models from their website.

Reddit user "DeepFake"

Nowadays the term deepfake is very common and understood by most. But the origin of the term and this method is usually less known. In 2015, videos of celebrities in very explicit scene started appearing on reddit, posted by an user called "DeepFakes" with no previous post history. People quickly realized that the videos were fake, and the reddit user gave details about the method they used. If you are curious you can find the original post on archive.org (very NSFW, obsviously)

The first papers reproducing this method came soon after and directly cited the reddit user as a source. From there a long list of papers improving little by little the method came one after the other and soon there was user friendly tools that allowed to create deepfakes really easily with no technical skills.

We will not dive into ethical considerations for letting this kind of tool spread on the internet, but there is definitely a discussion to have around distributing thoses models and the stakes of open sourcing them.

This technique became very popular and soon enough Hollywood took interest into it. In the last Star Wars movies the studio used deepfakes to let the late Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher be on screen despite not being in the alive club anymore. Now actors are starting to sell their image to train AI to create a virtual clone of themselves instead of actually starring in the movie. We're slowly moving toward a society where the actors themselves are being commodified and sold only for their image.

In the end, one user with technical skills and a questionable ethic started a whole new field of research.

Anime research

Waifu2x

In 2015 the best upscaling algorithm was not created by Google, Microsoft or any other GAFAM. It was called Waifu2x and behind it was no team of engineers but a relatively unknown japanese kaggle master.

If you're not familiar with internet lingo, a waifu is a girl from a manga or anime that is idealized by fans who are attracted to her. People can develop intimate relationships with their waifu that may be unsettling to some.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions on what motivated the creation of this model.

r/AnimeResearch

Reddit is also a widely used hub for organizing alternatives research communities online. For example, r/AnimeResearch is a subreddit that focuses on machine learning applied to anime. Currently four thousand people are following the page, so it remains a relatively small community.

One of their main goal is to create the ultimate decensoring model to unblur genitals in hentais. Their biggest achievement in that regard is the model DeepCreamPy, a GAN that can reconstruct any obstructed part in a anime image.

Another notable website is thisanimedoesnotexist, a parody of thispersondoesnotexist focused on anime girls. After years of focus on GANs, they recently moved to diffusion models and soon enough many lewds models appeared in the wild.

Final thoughts

While these communities may not always have the most noble intentions, their contributions to the field of machine learning and AI are undeniable. The academic world could greatly benefit from keeping an eye on what these groups are up to, as they also push the boundaries of research and innovation in unexpected ways.

People don't realize the untaped potential of commited, chronically online — and above all horny — nerds