For several months now, I’ve been looking for generative art tools that aren’t worthlessly crippled (for my pornographic purposes) by built-in #pornocalypse censor-filters. I have been made aware that I could in theory run some of the AI generative art tools myself on local hardware, but I don’t have enough local computing power. Until today, I haven’t found an online tool, one anybody can use, that would return me so much as a single bare nipple. And not for lack of trying!

Until today, I said. Today I discovered the AI Horde Image Generator Bot on Mastodon, and immediately started poking at it. My first try was overly complex, and not technically successful; I asked for “a plump topless pregnant hobbit woman with a fat ass and big bare breasts, bending over washing potatoes in a creek, fantasy, forest, lush forest, green forest, lush vegetation, sunshine, erotic, colorful Style: fantasypunk” and the image I got featured a woman who was not topless, not a hobbit, and not washing potatoes. But she certainly is plump and pregnant and, if that’s how you like to roll, erotic:

plump pregnant woman in see-through bikini, wading in a forest stream

That’s already the best result I’ve ever had when viewed through the lens of the “could this image be fetish fuel for someone” query. Yes, our bodacious wading lady certainly could. But I decided to try again, with a much simpler prompt. We demand nipples!

Before now, the pornocalypse filters in every tool I’ve tried have totally nipple-blocked me. So now let’s try for “a cottagecore witch who is entirely naked with big bare breasts, fantasy, colorful, erotic, NSFW” and see if a horny guy can get a couple of damned nipples in this joint. Answer, yes! Although I’m not confident those nipples are pointing quite in the right direction:

That qualified success (we can work on the nipple-pointing next time) was enough to send me searching for the provenance of the tool I was using. The bot is powered by the AI Horde which is “a crowdsourced distributed cluster of Image generation workers and text generation workers.” Crucially for my purposes, they allow and process adult queries, although individual participants in the distributed network of image generation workers have the software ability to refuse such queries. They’ve explained their porn policy in good detail, and there’s not a word in it I can find objectionable:

Does the Horde allow NSFW?

The answer must be: Yes, but voluntarily!

As the horde is effectively just a dumb pipe between workers and clients, barely one step above pure p2p, it is impossible for me to figure out which requests or generations are NSFW. In fact, way more powerful companies than myself have tried and failed to do the same, often completely destroying their service in the process.

As I do not have the resources or the capability to filter NSFW myself (I AM a solodev after all), like the generations themselves, I have to offload this decision, to the community itself.

So the recent update to the bridge adds two new fields to the client request APIs and 1 new field to the worker API.

The worker’s bridge now adds a new “nsfw” variable, which is sent to the Horde when the worker checks-in. It defaults to True which allows the worker to serve all requests like before. However if this is set to False, then this worker will only pick-up requests which are marked as SFW and will skip all NSFW requests. So if you, as the owner of the worker, don’t feel comfortable serving NSFW request, just flip the switch and you’re safe. And if you want to ensure that nobody sends a NSFW requests marked as SFW, you can enable the NSFW filter on your end, which will return a black image on NSFW generations.

…

I believe this approach can satisfy all parties now. Workers can ensure they generate only what they’re comfortable with, and clients can mark their requests accordingly, with an extra safety belt for “accidents”.

Of course the Mastodon bot is not the only way to access the AI Horde. They also have a web tool and a variety of other interfaces, clients, and apps that I’ve only just begun to explore. Understandably enough, resource constraints for free anonymous users appear to be a problem in the web tool, but there are paths (signing up, donating, becoming a generation worker yourself) for getting higher priority in the system. All of this for more research on another day. For now, the bot works well enough to play with!

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