AI has brought about many positive changes to the world — it can write articles, compose music, and create beautiful images and videos. But it also comes with some downsides. One of these is clothes remover AI tools.
Meta has come down heavily on clothes remover AI tools. The company announced that it will take legal action against Crush AI, a Hong Kong based company that used AI to remove the clothes from any image users supplied to it. Crucially, the clothes were removed without the consent of the users whose images were given to the AI model.
The Crush AI tool not only allowed the clothes to be removed from any picture, but also managed to turn the image into a video showing a person naked. In addition, it was able to manipuate the video to show the person performing explicit sexual acts or erotic poses.
Crush AI was using Meta to advertise its clothes remover app to users on Facebook and Instagram. Meta said it had tried acting against the clothes remover apps, but the apps managed to circumvent their systems. Meta has now taken the company to court in order to prevent them from advertising on its platforms. Meta said that Crush AI circumvented its moderation efforts by creating dozens of different domains, advertiser accounts, and thousands of individual ads, which made it hard for the company to block them all.
“With nudify apps advertised on the Internet and available in the App Stores themselves, removing them from one platform is not enough,” Meta said in a statement. “Now, when we remove ads, accounts or content promoting these services, we will share the information, starting with the URLs of the infringing apps and websites, with other technology companies through the Tech Coalition’s Lantern programme so they can investigate and take action in turn,” it added.
Clothes removing AI tools, of course, are one of the most distasteful uses of AI. AI systems now allow users to manipulate existing images — mainstream platforms for image generation like Google Imagen and Midjourney allow users to change parts of an image. But these tools don’t let users remove clothes from the image of a person — these websites return an error message when users give a request to remove the clothes from an image. But some AI apps had managed to train models that bypasses these controls, and were allowing users to take off the clothes from photos using AI. There are clear problems with such a feature — not only does the feature impinge on personal liberty, but it also has the potential for gross misuse: such images with clothes taken off could be spread, and given how realistic AI has gotten, could pass off as real images. And while Meta has prevented clothes removing AI apps from advertising on their platform, these apps can still be found on the internet. And while AI should ideally be allowed to grow without too many restrictions, clothes removing AI tools are one area where governments and authorities need to step in to make sure that such apps aren’t accessible to people on the internet.