Breakdown
- eBay sellers have been creating and selling hundreds of AI-generated nudes of famous celebs
- Despite Forbes reporting the listings to eBay, not all of them have been deleted
- Some sellers are classed as "Top Sellers" on the e-commerce platform, despite breaking the Adult Items policy
While there are plenty of reasons that AI can be useful for the public, the consensus against it is consistently growing. While there's already been some controversial uses for AI in recent memory, now, eBay sellers are selling AI-generated nudes of popular celebrities like Taylor Swift, Margot Robbie, and more on the platform.
AI certainly has its niche, yet useful features, such as the ones found in the Galaxy AI features list, or neat tricks like the MSI monitor that helps you cheat using AI. However, for every prompt that makes ChatGPT 4 useful, there seems to be dozens of cases where AI is just harmful to society.
As spotted by Forbes, people are now selling AI-generated nudes of celebrities on the one of the biggest e-commerce markets in the world, eBay. Forbes found over 40 different celebrities had various listings for AI nudes on the site, and while the company notified eBay about these breaches in the marketplace's policies, we've found that there's still easily available on eBay.
As Forbes mentions in the report, one seller who has been on eBay for quite some time had over 400 listings available, with multiple photoshopped nudes including the likes of Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Katy Perry, and more. There's also a variety of listings that feature sexually suggestive images generated by AI, being sold by "Top Sellers" on eBay, with eBay rewarding Top Sellers with financial perks and higher rankings via the store's search.
While eBay does allow you to have posts depicting nudity, as long as they're tagged with the Art and Collectibles category, as well as AI-generated nudes of fake people, the Adult Items policy specifically states that "AI Generated or Photoshopped nude or sexually suggestive images of public figures [are not allowed]". However, they're still easy to find on the marketplace as of us writing this article.
This isn't close to the first major issue with AI being used for either strange or just wrong reasons. An AI version of comedian George Carlin was the subject of rightful backlash, a Taiwanese actor "resurrected" their dead daughter using AI in a strange, and uncanny recreation that could speak and sing, and just last week, a Microsoft engineer sent a letter to the FTC about Copilot Designer generating harmful images.
Just like the Hydra, every time eBay will cut one seller off the market, another two will likely pounce at the opportunity. Until some laws and preventions are put into place, unfortunately, this will keep happening. eBay is far from the only company profiting off AI-generated nudes of celebrities, with the likes of Reddit, Twitter, and more making money from these uncomfortable and fake images.
This could be potentially made worse, with text-to-video generators using AI to create fake pornographic videos in the future. The upcoming OpenAI Sora model looks both exciting and terrifying in how good it looks, so things could easily get worse from here.