I was permanently banned from Tinder for trying to upload a picture of myself holding a pepper from my garden. I can only assume that Tinder's AI thought the pepper looked like an unacceptable body part.
I am absolutely in favor of using AI to combat unsolicited nudes as long as it's implemented something like: on the sender's side, show a warning before sending that the image appears to be in bad taste and asking for confirmation, then on the receiver's side, hiding the image behind a warning that it may be unwanted and showing two buttons, "show image" and "unmatch".
This is how Bumble appears to have implemented the feature. Though personally, I'm not going to test it because I think sending unsolicited nudes is a losing strategy for dating.
Yet, as rare as it might be, there are people of both genders who actually enjoy receiving unsolicited nudes. And people who enjoy sexual pickup lines. The judgement call of what is/isn't going to be attractive or appropriate ought be to left in the hands of the individuals dating as much as possible rather than controlled by a priest at a tech company.
> rare as it might be, there are people of both genders who actually enjoy receiving unsolicited nudes
I’m a nudist. I don’t enjoy receiving “unsolicited nudes” but a lot of acquaintances from that zone of my life do send photographs that sometimes depict them undressed in pursuit of whatever activity it is they’re depicting — usually the body in the picture is not the point of the exercise.
This just impedes the day-to-day communication of some folks. Imagine if Instagram were bought up by fundamentalists and suddenly implemented a filter that blocks all photographs of women who are not wearing headscarves.
It’s just yet another frustrating obstacle to overcome put in place by prudes.
> but I can’t really see a path forward that works for nudists and non nudists in this context
The very comment thread your comment is in describes a method that would work for both.
> on the sender's side, show a warning before sending that the image appears to be in bad taste and asking for confirmation, then on the receiver's side, hiding the image behind a warning that it may be unwanted and showing two buttons, "show image" and "unmatch".
Of corse I’m aware that I’m representing a minority concern and I’m well aware that as matters and principles currently stand we’re in a mutually irreconcilable situation. I’m not saying every effort should be abandoned.
I’m just saying that it would be mightily nice if those in decision making positions with regard to these issues and initiatives took the existence of this small and derided demographic into account occasionally.
When the goal is to create a service with 100% uptake, one can't optimize for the minority position, especially if the majority finds it objectionable.
So what you're looking for if you want something like that is a developer that is not optimizing to get 100% uptake. That's tricky to find, because the people with money always want 100% uptake.
It can’t have a target of “100% uptake” if it’s deliberately excluding some tiny but nonzero proportion of those who might otherwise subscribe.
That’s the bombastic reply anyway.
The more subtle and nuanced response is this is not a comparable situation because it’s not that developers are ignoring a small demographic, it’s that they’re deliberately working to make the environment actively hostile for that mini-demographic.
> It can’t have a target of “100% uptake” if it’s deliberately excluding some tiny but nonzero proportion of those who might otherwise subscribe.
Targets are always aspirational. "100% uptake" just means "As many users as possible."
> they’re deliberately working to make the environment actively hostile for that mini-demographic.
Yes. This is because the larger demographic has made clear that they don't want to share the room with the other demographic and they will leave if forced to.
Bumble is a dating app. For private communication, you would use an end-to-end encrypted messenger such as Signal or WhatsApp, where no one has any access to your pictures.
They cared a lot less before the lawsuits started hitting.
Their appreciation for nudity is offset by their aversion to standing around in courtrooms or paying money for an expensive representative to do it for them.
> I was permanently banned from Tinder for trying to upload a picture of myself holding a pepper from my garden. I can only assume that Tinder's AI thought the pepper looked like an unacceptable body part.
If that was a "peter pepper", the AI could have reacted just like a human.
NSFW warning in case you search: yes, it can look very close to the real thing.
I tried to grow them in my balcony among other types of chili but this type failed probably because of wrong climate and/or bad soil.
50% of the pictures I upload to discord which contains my hands/fingers are flagged as porn and automatically deleted, it's a major pain in the ass. On the other hand I uploaded artistic nudes a few times with less issues
>Yet, as rare as it might be, there are people of both genders who actually enjoy receiving unsolicited nudes. And people who enjoy sexual pickup lines. The judgement call of what is/isn't going to be attractive or appropriate ought be to left in the hands of the individuals dating as much as possible rather than controlled by a priest at a tech company.
Everybody enjoys all these things if it comes from the right person. All women and men would welcome a dick pic of a boob flash from the right conditions and from the right person.
There's also a sex imbalance as well. Women are picky, thus the "right" people that send these things to them encompass probably the top 1% of the population. For men the opposite is true. Boob pics are welcome from likely 75% of the population. Also men have a much lower fear response and disgust response from advances from the wrong people so the other 25% aren't too big of an issue either. Not a hard statistics but you get my point.
Thus the result is a fundamental misunderstanding between both sexes. Many Men would welcome a daily boob pic from a well endowed woman from bumble. And some men are dumb enough to assume women want the same thing. Women on the other hand aren't typically as stupid, but they're much much more cautious in their approach; but they certainly understand men and have capitalized this kind of thing on OF and porn. Women are delusional in the sense that a lot of them think some perfect man who thinks like them exists (probably does 0.01% of the population is my guess) and that they can land this man.
Largely this dick pic offense is a sort of issue raised exclusively by females. A lot of men buy into it too, but it's usually only because they empathize with women. The great majority of men themselves never experience it as raw disgust or fear the way women do.
That's hilarious. I would take that as a sign the platform is as thoughtful with arbitrary enforcement (without review) and that it's users aren't much sharper.
Why do you take it to mean that people who use a dating app are somewhat dumb? I can’t understand how you’d think that from Tinder misclassifying a photo
Firstly, they invited themselves being deep faked in perpetuity. The average consumer who posts their face online doesn't understand the gravity, implications, and permanence that that entails... like their future kids and grandkids stumbling on their dating life, being deep faked in porn, appearing in chumbox image recycling on CNN or (insert ads-heavy site here), social media phantom profile stuffing, and the rights related to company acquisitions. That's just for starters.
Anyone who can't go outside, share hobbies with other humans in person, or connect with people organically probably isn't worth meeting. Dating websites are bursting with the lazy, the truculent, the undesirable, the unpleasant, and the under-socialized. To be fair, there haven't been so many (%) single and "childfree" (old-age misery-in-waiting) people in all of human history. I blame the myriad of distractions: first TV, video games, then VHS (porn), the internet, and finally smartphones. Now, combinations of all these together manifest as digital hallucinations consume the lion's share of people's attention and lives while they miss-out on genuine connections in the moment sharing something real.
>on the sender's side, show a warning before sending that the image appears to be in bad taste
Quick feedback like this is what makes people figure out the system very fast, defeating the protection's purpose. It would work much better, if the warning only showed up on the receiver's side - maybe a blank image and the warning, a heavily blurred image and the warning, and a prompt if received would like it to view or not.
> The judgement call of what is/isn't going to be attractive or appropriate ought be to left in the hands of the individuals dating as much as possible rather than controlled by a priest at a tech company.
Using a service doesn't entitle you to control how that service works.
As long as a service is lawful, the owner should be able to define "what is appropriate." Period.
> Yet, as rare as it might be, there are people of both genders who actually enjoy receiving unsolicited nudes. And people who enjoy sexual pickup lines. The judgement call of what is/isn't going to be attractive or appropriate ought be to left in the hands of the individuals dating as much as possible rather than controlled by a priest at a tech company.
I don't understand. Are you suggesting that Bumble should allow users to send unsolicited nudes to strangers, despite the vast majority of women not appreciating that? Why would any company want to intentionally degrade the experience of roughly half their users?
I'm suggesting that Bumble shouldn't be the judge of what messages are appropriate to send or not. But they absolutely should provide filtering tools and feedback to users to reduce low quality or obnoxious behavior.
I don't disagree with you that a majority of women do not want unsolicited nudes. But there's not a consensus or black and white line between messages that are wanted or unwanted. Not all women are puritans, yet big tech censorship tends to push all interactions toward a puritanical moral ideal.
Personally, I'm interested in dating people who are sex positive, kink friendly, polyamorous and open minded. While I absolutely do not send unsolicited nudes or lead with crude messages, it can be hard to find people with a similar mindset when dating apps insert their morals between me and my potential dates.
I'm advocating for sensible filters and feedback, rather than moralistic censorship. Even if a majority of people agree with the morals. The only morals that dating apps ought to be concerned with are that the interacting parties are all consenting adults.
> I'm suggesting that Bumble shouldn't be the judge of what messages are appropriate to send or not. But they absolutely should provide filtering tools and feedback to users to reduce low quality or obnoxious behavior.
That's an untenable position. Bumble should (and does) block pornographic, illegal, or harassing content. As already mentioned in the post, sending unsolicited nudes is illegal in at least one jurisdiction, so it's hardly a stretch to include unsolicited nudes in this category.
> But they absolutely should provide filtering tools and feedback to users to reduce low quality or obnoxious behavior. [...] I'm advocating for sensible filters and feedback, rather than moralistic censorship.
Isn't that exactly what this feature is? Users still have the option to view potential nudes; they just aren't exposed by default. It seems obvious that the feature should be opt-out (rather than opt-in), given that the majority of users would prefer not to be exposed to unsolicited nudes.
If you let users add an "is okay with nudes" flag, to their profile, then those who want could just consent to receiving unsolicited nudes while anyone else can have a safe experience free of unexpected sausage.
I don't see how that is in any way less practical than outright blocking everything.
I imagine you’re a guy thinking about how you don’t mind a free pic of some sweet leche carriers landing in your inbox, but the only women who send unsolicited nudes are OnlyFans spammers.
Surprisingly enough, you're wrong with nearly every single assumption you made in your comment, starting as far back as with me not even using any dating apps.
> Are you suggesting that Bumble should allow users to send unsolicited nudes to strangers, despite the vast majority of women not appreciating that? Why would any company want to intentionally degrade the experience of roughly half their users?
Why must it be one or the other? They could have a per-user flag to opt in to unsolicited nudes.
Even better, a more fine grained series of flags or enums indicating the level of nudity, topless, bottomless, or even background scenery (to be able to filter out, or in, public nudity).
> Why must it be one or the other? They could have a per-user flag to opt in to unsolicited nudes.
I mean, isn't Bumble's implementation effectively that? Users can still view the potential nudes if they want.
In the abstract, I don't mind if Bumble wants to add a such a flag. In practice, I doubt they will since (1) it's a feature few people are likely to use and (2) the potential for bad press is high ("Woman Receives Thousands of Unwanted Nudes on Bumble after Accidentally Changing Settings").
They clearly are saying that one can provide a system that allows for it, but which also allows people to 'never' receive unsolicited nudes (by enabling the solicitation of acceptance of nudes).
Why? He's suggesting some people like that and advocating for liberalism in this (invoking the idea that it is religious conservatism that leads companies to be averse to such things).
I didn't find their comment clear, hence my question.
Honestly, their comment feels closer to concern trolling than a genuine grievance (not to insinuate that they're arguing in bad faith, just that the problem is so minor in comparison). Sure, I suppose Bumble could implement a per-user flag instead (at the risk of introducing a plethora of OnlyFans spam, as someone pointed out), but Bumble's new filter is significantly better than the status quo. I truly can't emphasize this point enough. The OP is imagining there's some slim minority of users who are harmed by being unable to receive unsolicited nudes -- and I'm sure that group exists somewhere -- but frankly the largest group "harmed" by Bumble's filter are perverts who get off on sending unsolicited nudes to women.
184 isn't a highlight of German legislation though. It's one of the many leftovers from the prussian police and justice system, which had a heavy emphasis on morality and decency. 184 for example also criminalizes everyone in Germany who ever uploaded porn to a site that doesn't comply with current youth protection laws (which is all of them, basically).
Fully agree that the 184 series of StGB is not up to date (e.g. that 17 year olds routinely end up in trouble with the law for sending their partners consensual pictures) and the German youth protection law is ridiculous, but the idea that sending someone unsolicited pornography is bad is a good one IMHO.
Sure, nothing wrong per se with 184(1)6 criminalizing that.
I'd argue though that this only comes about unintentionally because 184i (sexual harassment) only covers physical sexual harassment.
Meanwhile non-physical sexual harassment is completely legal in Germany unless it is an insult in itself (185).
IMHO the proper way is to mostly yeet 184 (because there is no particular reason for the state to morally regulate porn using the criminal code apart from stuff like CSAM) and criminalize sexual harassment in general (physical or not). That's of course going to be a hard sell for German conservatives (I can already see CDU and AfD go "the leftist greens dictatorship is making DATING illegal!")
Honestly, I think the proper way with most laws would be to just yeet them entirely and go for a round of refactoring; but alas, politicians aren't programmers and neither do they have the same mindset of cleaning up after themselves or even after others, so we're stuck with sub-optimal legislation like this and that probably won't ever change.
It has happened a couple of times in the past (e.g. with the law on transgender people or homosexual marriage) that the courts stepped in and demanded improvement or yeeted laws outright as they became untenable.
It's not unthinkable, particularly as the generation "18th birthday gift? Onlyfans account" enters political life, that the same will happen again. Additionally, the youth protection commission NRW is on a holy crusade against Pornhub and other sites - should they eventually be successful, younger people who don't care about the news and only react when they see their favourite porn site going dark in Germany may rise up and demand reforms as well.
And on top of that, boomers are thankfully slowly dying out and retiring, so the gerontocrats in parliament will go away as well.
> you will see it is now indeed illegal in a few places
There's a bill waiting for a Governor's signature in Virginia (which I guess will make it illegal there) and some bills being discussed / worked on in other places but as far as I can tell from the article, Texas is currently the only state with an actual law on the books to make it illegal.
At what point does a nude become unsolicited though? I mean this is a dating site.
If I put my arm around someone or lean in for a kiss that could be unsolicited but shouldn't be illegal in the context of a date. Similarly dirty talking in a date is different to doing it in the office.
I suppose this could be dealt with through user preferences (don't show nudes/ doesn't appreciate nudes) but the line seems blurred in this situation. It isn't as if you're walking around town in a Mac.
I'm not saying it's ok, but it's not definitely, not ok. People are different, dating is already hard enough without worrying about if you're going to be arrested for trying to get to second base.
It's honestly baffling that I have to explain this, but: Expressing interest in finding someone to date does not imply any form of consent to being sent nudes.
Some people might want that, and for them it would make sense if platforms added an opt-in feature to signal their interest in unsolicited nudes, or to opt-out of whatever form of filtering there might be.
But the default should be that you can open an app for meeting people without being forced to see someone's dick.
Well I've already covered the second two paragraphs.
And I didn't claim the first paragraph was the case.
But I can see a flirty conversation getting to a point where sending a nude might be reasonable to one party. Just like putting a hand on someone's inner thigh might be reasonable to one party at a certain point in a date. It may not be appreciated, signs might have been misread, but unless you want people to sign contracts before they go to bed with each other there's always the danger of there being misunderstandings. And in my view misunderstandings shouldn't be criminalised.
My girlfriend might not appreciate me sending her nudes. I hope we can agree that's different to flashing at random people on the street.
My point is there's nuance. This isn't a black and white issue, certainly in the context of a dating app.
Right but then you're making 'reasonably' and 'directly' do a lot of heavy lifting.
And what does directly even mean in this context? The standards for initiating sex don't require a sit down conversation as to what each party is agreeing to. So why should nude sending be held to a different standard?
The context for this is talking to a person on a dating app where you haven't met them personally. In that case, assuming you've never met them, I think it's inappropriate to send an explicit photo/video unless they straight up ask to see it.
"The standards for initiating sex don't require a sit down conversation as to what each party is agreeing to."
This attitude leads to women having sex/relations they aren't super comfortable doing. It's not a mood killer if you take a beat just to make sure you're on the same page with expectations and it takes a lot less time than locating, opening, and putting on a condom.
You stated in a different comment that your gf tells you off and it kills the mood if you ask to move to the bedroom or having sex while impaired, but surely you realize that's a totally different situation than you meeting up with someone from a dating app, right? Spontaneously acting with someone you know and with who you have built trust is waaaaaay different than sending an unsolicited nude or making advances on someone who is a little more than a stranger.
In modern countries that have implemented a consent-based model instead of a coercion-based one you can't just initiate sex with someone based on your presumption that the other person wants it. If they actually don't (even if they don't explicitly say "no") it's considered rape by the law.
Should I also breathalyse my girlfriend if she gets drunk and horny?
She tells me off if I suggest going to bed to have sex because it kills the mood. So what? Am I to give up sex because our views on consent don't match up with your views?
Have you ever actually been in a relationship? Or do you just have an aversion to sponteniety?
Wow, disgusting comment. I have no interest in discussing this with a rape apologist. Good bye and I hope you come to realize how ancient your views on equality are.
Many years ago (ca. 2009?) at a previous employer we had an enterprise email scanner which included a content filtering feature which could block "pornographic images". We ended up turning it off as it had too many false positives since it was an insurance company that dealt with injuries so a lot of legitimate injury photos would get classed as porn and blocked. I think it was basically looking at how much of an image was skin tones.
The more interesting thing about that feature was that it A) only blocked nude images of white people, and B) would aggressively block photos of golden retrievers much to the annoyance of someone in the claims team who bred them and occasionally received photos to her work email.
* During COVID, a medical school professor complains his class livestream would get cut off constantly without warning because he is teaching anatomy and showing pictures.
* Civics class online quiz. Multiple choice question. A: *; B: *; C: *; D: * - apparently all four choices are censored because they are names of Chinese leader.
* A police officer complains his files related to a rape case he is investigating was deleted by the cloud service provider
Google docs spell/grammar check shuts off if the word "anal" appears anywhere in a sentence. https://imgur.com/dTJmsTt
For some reason "anal" and the F-bomb are the only two words I can find where it does this.
The craziest part is if you type something like "analss gland" it figures out you're trying to type "anal gland" and shuts down spellcheck, even though anal gland (dogs) is a perfectly g-rated use of the word anal.
Even the word fuck can be perfectly acceptable in plenty of contexts. Weird that someone went to the trouble of building in weird kill-switch exceptions in a spell checker.
“This feature remains severely disliked by users, with feedback such as ‘Fuck this moronic new button!’ being an example of the milder responses.”
As an Australian, I’m fucking livid these fucks think they have the right to fuck around with my use of the word fuck.
That is to say… as a native speaker of the lovely little English variant where the word fuck or words derived from it are valid in almost every single linguistic context the English language possesses… I take offence at this petty US cultural imperialism.
Sometimes I think there's a specific person at Google with some kind of vocabulary-related mental illness. Just try and get Google Voice Typing to type the word "o'clock". You can stand there saying it over and over, and Google won't stop listening indicating it's hearing and interpreting the word, but it just refuses to type it.
why is it even a 'feature'? someone had to go in add a switch for the word anal to turn spell check off. it isnt like they just dont want to be involved with swear words. this is a feature that makes the app worse?!?
plus anal isnt even a swear word. how do you want me to describe the hole where the shit comes out? this is just wrong on so many levels.
I used to work at a place that blocked a significant fraction of incoming Dutch emails. Eventually we figured out it rejected any message with "kunt" ("he/she can"), which is not exactly uncommon. Apparently they were flagged as deliberate attempts to circumvent the profanity filter.
Do you want to block attempts to skirt the profanity filter? How to you avoid reintroducing the Scunthorpe problem?
Jeez, darn are all mild forms of expletives, should they be blocked? What about bloody? That many anglophones would go to if you couldn't swear?
Surely if you can't use those, people are just going to say gosh instead, or Smeg or frel. Should they also be banned. Swear words exist for a reason, you can perhaps get rid of the harshest forms, you are never going to remove the need or desire for people to swear though.
Better Off Ted had a great premise, but it didn't survive past two seasons because it didn't "click". It was the right idea, but just like with successful shows, certain magic that not even the creators understand has to happen. And it didn't happen here, which is a shame.
And it really sticks out as one of the few paradigm shifts we’ve had in the last 10 years. In 2009, it really was an impossible task to do that kind of image recognition. But by 2012, it was available in a library for anyone.
Around 2007, there was an image board type of site that was struggling to build a system that could reliably detect these sort of images.
Their solution ended up being to run it through face detection first -- which was pretty reliable even back then.
It turns out, people who sent unsolicited lewd photos tended to do so without their face in frame. So if a face was detected, it was significantly less likely to be lewd.
Just an amusing anecdote. Wish I could find the blog post describing it.
Also a great example of effective feature engineering.
The success of gradient boosting and deep learning lies largely in the ability of those models to "learn" sophisticated high-order features from raw data. Their particular success in working with images, audio, and video lie in their ability to construct more (and more sophisticated) features, beyond what a team of smart humans with domain knowledge could have constructed by hand given huge resources. In a sense, the only difference between model architectures is the feature space that they embed the raw data into.
That said, sometimes you just need to give the model a good starting place, and sometimes you can obviate A sophisticated model largely or entirely, if you can come up with highly "explanatory" features on your own.
To this day, I think the ability to come up with high-impact features is one of the differentiating factors of really good industry data scientist.
>Traversing the trade-offs between state-of-the-art performance and the ability to serve our user base at scale, we implemented (in its latest iteration) an EfficientNetv2-based binary classifier: a convolutional network that has faster training speed and overall better parameters efficiency. It uses a combination of better designed architecture and scaling, with layers like MBConv (that utilizes 1×1 convolutions to wide up the space and depth-wise convolutions for reducing the number of overall parameters) and FusedMBConv (that merges some steps of the vanilla MBConv above for faster execution), to jointly optimize training speed and parameter efficiency. The model has been trained leveraging our GPU powered data centers in a continuous exercise of dataset, network and hyperparameters (the settings used to speed up or improve the training performance) optimization.
This is a lot of words to say, "we used an off-the-shelf architecture". Like it's literally just Google's public implementation copied over.
I'm most interested in how they handle it for the users. It says potential "nudes" are blurred and can be "reported" or viewed. Will it tell the sender they're sending something that's going to be blurred? (which on one hand would let them resolve a false positive but also maybe let them find an adversarial image).
My recollection of Bumble is that all images were blurred (at least until you already sent pictures to each other?)
While I imagine having a good filter is important given the scale of online dating I would think all other filters would eliminate most of the problem (auto blurring images if people have only sent a few messages to each other, blur the first image sent, blur images by anyone who has been reported before, etc.)
Yes there is a length of conversation factor in visibility for normal photos too (I think).
But for "adult" photos they just blur.
I suspect people like this feature because they want to make sure they don't have people around them when they open that message (assuming it is a consensualy exchanged pic)
Really? I would have guessed most people would want to know who the "toxic" people are in their life so that they can take appropriate action instead of finding out in a worse way later.
Bumble is an app for meeting new people, not general-purpose socialization. I’d assume that if it had an auto-block feature for lewd images, it would remove the conversation from the inbox and there would most likely be no further contact.
We have been secretly, yet proudly drawing our members on stone walls since the dawn of time.
In Centralia, PA there use to be something called Grafitti Highway. It's an old highway road (they created a new road around it) that people would go and graffiti this old, unused highway. It might as been called Penis Highway as innately that's what was mostly drawn there. Too bad they shut it down lol
I'd say 95% of people on this website haven't received one and even Bumble said it's around 0.1% of users which is not comparable to spam levels at all
I wonder if there is a way to use this to finetune an image generating AI to generate images that the AI would think is lewd but is not. (similar to what was done with a Yahoo model in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12756462 )
More likely is people making adversarial dick pics to get past the filter, which is very quick to do when you have the parameters of a differentiable model. I noticed they were careful to state that they are releasing a model instead of the model they are using though.
Granted, I don't understand the psychology of people who send dick pics so I could be wrong about this, but I get the impression it's not a deeply considered thing conducive to spending lots of effort on. Adversarial dick pics are probably a rare threat just because most men won't be bothered.
As a nudist I find it increasingly frustrating battling all these well-meaning impediments every firm seems to be throwing up everywhere for the sake of combating pornography.
Latest discovery is that iOS’s new “press to copy person” doesn’t work if the person is undressed, which makes sense if they’re trying to ensure it doesn’t facilitate copy-and-paste porn of the lowest calibre but… sheesh.
I don’t understand why so much effort gets sunk into this arms race between people who want to distribute material featuring naked humans and firms that are doing their darnest to make it impossible.
I'm reminded of the following description of the electronic thumb from Doulgas Adams' The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy[0]:
---
> *Electronic Thumb*
> A short squat black rod, smooth and matte with a couple of flat switches and dials at one end. It allows Hitchhikers to flag down passing spacecraft to hitch a lift.
> The Thumb is used by Hitchhikers throughout the Galaxy to steal a ride aboard starships who's operators have little interest in taking along extra passengers.
> Half the electronic engineers in the galaxy are constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming the signals generated by the Thumb, while the other half are constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming the jamming signals.
> I don’t understand why so much effort gets sunk into this arms race between people who want to distribute material featuring naked humans and firms that are doing their darnest to make it impossible.
"People who want to distribute material featuring naked humans" have many, many, many options. Bumble just isn't one of them.
Bumble does "their darnest to make it impossible" because they want to. Perhaps because their livelihood depends on preventing their dating app from turning into a porn app.
There should be a feature to warp and bend the naughty bits so they're tiny and shriveled and encrusted with warts and scabs and spiders, and post a copy back to the offender, to discourage them.
Funnily enough one of my SFW pictures got detected recently on bumble and my working theory is that they detected my phone as a bulge. It might be fun to try to test what type of content it misidentifies.
20 years ago when candy bar phones were popular i designed a dildo-shaped phone case – a sort of “push up bra” for men. Not sure why my product never took off.
A lot of their copy seems to indicate the priority is detecting dick picks. I realize those are the vast, vast majority of "unsolicited lewd images", but I do wonder how capable their model is at detecting pussy pics, if at all.
Does this mean it can also detect "send nudes" to avoid false positives on solicited lewd images? Or does the UI have a on/off toggle for currently-accepting-lewd-images?
That's commendable from them and a step in the right direction to address a real problem. Unsolicited nudes are considered as sexual assault, and illegal in many countries.
However, I wonder if that's genuine or some PR stunt, as it's "simply" a binary classifier using an off-the-shelf architecture (EfficientNet v2), and having the trained model being publicly released can now allow adversarial attacks.
sexual harassment is too extreme. 20 years of prison in some places.
Cyber flashing is indeed the more appropriate term.
I will be absolutely unequivocally clear about my opinion on this: Cyber flashing does not deserve jail time. It deserves being banned from bumble. Anyone who is so low and so cruel to jail someone for cyber flashing... that person is the one who deserves jail time.
Also logistically you'd be jailing millions of people if it was sexual harassment.
In short, dick pics are a problem with people being stupid. Not a problem with people being criminals. Let's keep the wording appropriate to the severity of the infraction. It's cyberflashing... NOT sexual harassment.
You're relying on logical alignment to regulate your morals. Well it's biased because it can go both ways. For the direction opposite to your query one can logically say: "Dick pics on the internet are ok why isn't flashing your dick ok in public?" You simply chose the direction that fits with your bias.
The reality is common sense is the best choice here. There is no alignment when obviously your gut tells you flashing your dick in public is much worse then a dick pic.
That gut feeling that regulates that feeling is the same feeling that tells us that while porn is ok to be all over the internet, it's not ok for porn scenes to be played in public.
That’s kind of the problem I have with it, I guess. It’s not something to be pithy about, it comes across as a euphemism that softens the impact of the violating act it actually is.
Pretty embarrassing the number of people here who seem to have no issue with unsolicited nudes. Has anyone ever talked to anyone who's been harrassed, assaulted, stalked, anything? Yikes
I think all would agree that most men would appreciate unsolicited nudity from potential partners and most women wouldn’t. What’s the most likely explanation for this gender effect?
This looks like the detector does not run on the phone but I could be wrong about that. If it does not, that implies all messages on this dating app are not private. These conversations and pictures could be very sensitive.
our scale allows us to collect a best-in-the-industry dataset of both lewd and non-lewd images
For another, it seems like they are saying they collect all these images of people's private parts and use them for their training set.
This isn't some huge revelation. E2E encryption isn't something that Bumble advertises, and their privacy policy [1] plainly states:
> We review the content of messages sent in the App to identify topics, sentiments, and trends across our Users. We will take steps to remove personally identifying information from such messages, prior to reviewing them. We will not share the content of User messages or information we derive from them with any third party.
edit: and for the record if your messages on a dating app are not E2E encrypted then you are making a terrible mistake. I can't believe anyone would voluntarily make this decision.
> edit: and for the record if your messages on a dating app are not E2E encrypted then you are making a terrible mistake. I can't believe anyone would voluntarily make this decision.
Reality goes something like this: You roll out your E2EE dating app, it gets successful, you're winning bigly. Then cops show up with an order from a judge demanding you hand over information regarding user #890202 because they are suspected of using your platform to entice minors into sexual activity. This is usually where the E2EE worship falls flat, for legitimate societal reason.
If you want E2EE you need to use a dedicated app specifically ONLY for that (Signal, WhatsApp, etc). Any time you bolt on other business or incentives and then use E2EE as the messaging platform you will discover a world of pain in my opinion.
it's always that isn't it? They could go raid the guy's home perhaps. Alternatively you sent embarrassing messages to a woman on a dating app, you have a weird fetish you discussed with someone on there, you're cheating on your wife, or maybe some nation-state actor wants some blackmail on you. A hacker or disgruntled employee has dumped a database of all the messages and journalists and Twitter users are going through it right now. Or maybe you don't trust Bumble. They seem to have an axe to grind anyway.
Not that the issue of minors isn't a problem but I don't think that should always override people's privacy. And FWIW there is plenty of space for people to share compromising messages on the dating app before they can manage to convince a stranger to download Signal and continue the conversation there. That's if you're lucky enough that she doesn't immediately think you are a scammer of some kind.
I am on the side of privacy extremists but a lot of people find that to be a nonstarter so to each their own. I wouldn't dare go on a dating app that didn't have E2EE though or at least a way to anonymize yourself so no phone # required. ;)
I think privacy-first is the the correct mental model to have. I've had to explain to some people that the usage of a certain platform by drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized violent crime isn't a defect, but really a feature in theory. If the tech or platform sucked/was-compromised, they wouldn't gravitate towards it. It is a weird conversation, but most people do seem to grok it in that sense.
Though it's possible they're sourcing the photos in the above way, in general I'd assume that the messages are not private. Unless messages are end-to-end encrypted on a platform, you have to assume the platform can access them.
(Full disclosure; I work for a Bumble competitor. And I applaud Bumble for open sourcing this. It's great if we can work together as an industry to protect people from sexual abuse).
There's some questions I have about this release
the interest is in the model itself. They released the pre-trained model as a zip that you can download from their website but they do not mention the license for using this model anywhere. It is unclear from the documentation and license under what conditions you're allowed to use it. The zipfile itself doesn't contain any terms of use inside.
Though they give instructions on how to tweak the model with your own additional input images; again it's unclear from the license if you can create derivatives of the Model.
One might assume it falls under the Apache license that's included in the repository. But the model itself does not live in the repository (is not bundled with the source code) so it's not clear. Also Apache isn't really suited for assets and models. it's more meant for source code.
It would be nice if they would adopt a license that explicitly mentions how the model can be used like StableDiffusion does.
Probably not much at all. They used a pretty straightforward and easy to run model, EfficientNetV2. Something that doesn't give out the best results, but will offer very quick inference and train time.
I wonder if marketing put the kibosh on the original title, since the URL slug differs substantially from the article's title
While doing a little view-source: spelunking, I also noticed they're straight-up lying about their alternate language link tags, which I guess is only slightly less interesting than if they had, in fact, translated that blog post into the 26 languages they pretend to support
In the show, Jian Yang sells the app to a social media company for precisely detecting this sort of phallic imagery, so I think Mike Judge knew exactly what he was doing.
OT--But Mike Judge was interviewed recently on Fly On The Wall, the podcast from David Spade and Dana Carvey (who doesn't have a podcast these days?)... and it was a great episode. There's a part where he explains where the Butthead's guffawing laugh comes from.. so good.
The podcast is focused on interviewing SNL alums.. but has recently branched out a bit. Anyway, I didn't know this, but Mike Judge did some Milton (the character who later appeared in Office Space) short for them.
Dating apps are tailored to people in the top X% of attractiveness. Don't take it personally. Most people aren't successful on them, even the ones who get a lot of matches.
>Dating apps are tailored to people in the top X% of attractiveness.
They aren't. I'm in the top 1% for income and top 5% for looks. I used to get no matches on tinder. I asked a few female friends to come up with a profile they thought would be more attractive. After I saw what they came up with (I have a boat, I fly first class, I'm in a holiday in Europe) I deleted it and move them to acquaintances.
The type of woman who would find that sort of thing attractive is _not_ the type of woman who I'd want to sleep with let alone have a relationship with.
A close friend of mine kills it on tinder. He just has pics of himself looking good and smiling. He basically doesn't need to book a place to stay when going on holiday (lol). I would not put him in the top 5% (maybe top 10).
Your pics either sucked or you're not as attractive as you think you are. You don't need pics of yourself being rich. Or maybe you're older (he's 27).
Something about your story doesn't add up. I would certainly consider myself NOT in the top %5 of looks, and get plenty of matches. And I'm not looking for trashy women who are only into material things either.
On looking at the average person I see on the street. Do you not have eyes?
>and get plenty of matches
Matches are the first step, then you have chatting, organizing a date and then a hookup/relationship. The attrition rate is abysmal at every level. It's just not time efficient to use online dating.
Not convinced. There are obvious steps that'd be more "average guy" friendly, but would kill engagement and so revenue.
E.g. slow down showing profiles when they have more than X pending matches. An ex told me she'd paid for Gold on Tinder once out of curiosity (lets you see how many have swiped right on you). Her pending matches were in the 4 digits. These profiles "soak up" a lot of the time and attention of people on these platforms without creating a real chance of matches for users who aren't super aggressively matching everyone.
This again trains for a behaviour where men match a lot, and women can afford to be very selective.
But reducing the displays of the most popular profiles so their pending matches queue is never very deep won't do anything good for revenue.
Another option is to train models to predict likely matches, and sort displays accordingly, but that again won't do much for revenue, because it would mean average men would be more likely to be shown women closer to their attractiveness level which there is less competition for rather than women with 4 figure deep queues of waiting matches.
Remember, most dating sites make money from making it hard enough to get a match that people pay for premium services to increase their chance. They have a built in incentive to exaggerate the possibilities while maintaining friction in actually meeting someone. It must be hard for you to find someone for most of them to do well.
If you can convince people to pay for a less perversely incentivised model, maybe. E.g. a "pay per match" model maybe, if well protected against scammers. But suspect it'd be a very hard sell.
I agree that among the pool of people on these apps, there are lots of matches that would work out among average-looking people. So why doesn't that happen?
It's because a lot of attraction is based on things that photos and profiles can't convey. The medium of "digital app" is just very, very wrong for optimizing dating.
I've seen research that the most efficient way to handle dating is in-person speed dating.
> It's because a lot of attraction is based on things that photos and profiles can't convey.
Especially for men. The worst thing is the imbalance. Compatibility in a long-term relationship is certainly based on factors other than looks for both sexes but, like it or not, all relationships start with basic attraction. Women's basic attraction comes from their looks in the vast majority of cases. But for most men, it has to come from somewhere else. Usually status, power, ability, humour etc. So it works absolutely fine for women, but is a complete non-starter for the average man.
I'm not surprised speed-dating is more efficient. My experience with online dating is that even if I find a woman physically attractive I might not find her attractive in real life. We might simply not hit it off, or there can even be other factors like smell that are off-putting. Speed dating eliminates those immediately as well as allowing people to show off non-physical attractive qualities. I still don't think it's optimal for men, though. The best way is to get good at something and show it off in public. Like playing in a band, public speaking, leading and commanding respect of other men etc. That can make otherwise physically repulsive men attractive. There are countless examples.
For that to work in practice implies a rigidly monogamous society where almost everyone participates in the same context, bonds for life and does so at an early stage of their lifecycle, as well as few mismatches between both relationship goals and pairing criteria. That's essentially the traditional non-polygamous agrarian civilization model if we ignore the fact that the 0.01% or so of nobles had multiple partners. On dating apps the dynamic is very different.
Most dating doesn't lead to permanent pairings, so the fact that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women isn't that relevant when people are free to date at different frequencies and durations.
Dating apps end up mostly being used for casual dating and hookups. The closest thing to that for average or below average guys is prostitution, which of course has been around a while and much money was and is being made.
I'm relevantly good looking, no problem with getting a beautiful woman IRL, but on dating apps I get no matches. Or if I do its girls who are either average or tinder addicts who everyone should avoid.
My working theory is on a dating app woman have unlimited access, so tend to go torwards the top 99.9% of men.
Solution: Shadow ban hyper attractive people.
Solution 2: Only show people a similar level of attractiveness as yourself.
You are 100% correct, unsuccessful guys need to seek help and there are paid services out there. Or speak to a few women on these platforms (chicken-egg I know) and you will be told what others are doing that is turning them off. You need to treat this for what it is, marketing. You don't just put up your first attempt and say women aren't into me. You need to iterate and experiment. I know, it's hard work, 90% of guys won't put in the effort, they will just complain they aren't in the top 0.1% in attractiveness.
I disagree with that the top man can not date more than a few.
A single woman needs a romantic partner let's say ever three months, a man can have one every day. We see this in gay men having 500+ average sexual partners. Gay men can have sex as much as they want, because of access.
Top 0.1% of men can also have sex when ever they want, they are getting constant matches with 6,7,8 level woman. Well below their level, because its easier to get people below your level into bed without courting.
They have sex, he doesn't call her back, she is mad at men for another three months.
A few men can soak up all of the above average woman, considering they are on a bell curve and are rare them self. Only a subset of people are even on these dating apps.
Average looking people don't have this problem, because they are happy with matching other average woman who the top men are not interested in.
Summary: top men can date below their own level because a 7 woman, three below them is still very beautiful. But a 7 man can't date three below their own level because a 4 is not attractive and not worth the time using a app for.
Judging by how you are framing the issue and the way you've talked about women in this thread (which has been a red flag for me, at least) I suspect your experience has nothing to do with your physical traits.
If you'd read the thread, you'll find out that the poster's character is a part of the discussion (as he claims his character has nothing to do with his lack of success on dating sites).
The argument is, "I'm having trouble getting women to approve of me because of systemic issues with women."
I'm pointing out that the causal relationship the poster is making might be wrong. The issue could be the behavior if the poster, not some systemic issue with women.
A less dramatic version of your first solution is to show a profile progressively less the more matches are pending, and the more selective you are in rejecting pending matches.
Couple that with trying to predict likely matches and weight towards showing profiles which are likely to match and you would likely approach solution 2 without explicitly focusing only on attractiveness.
But at the same time you'll have killed a major revenue driver for a lot of dating sites: frustration over few matches.
How do dating apps make money? They were all prerevenue last time I used one.
I think trying to move away from images is a good idea, so people can showcase their worth to better compete with the physical gifted people who benefit from images.
I thought of a idea where you have to have a reel 10second video showcasing 5 traits
Let's say, you see the list of options and choose
Cooking
Humour
Adventure
Intellect
Strength
Say those are your traits, your reel will show case them. With the aim of creating relationships rather than hook ups.
Most of them make apps either by upsells or via ads, both of which gives them an incentive to prolong your usage of the site.
The typical user stays only for weeks or months at a time. Many users come back rarely enough that e.g. Bumble offers a lifetime premium membership for less than it costs you to renew their quarterly membership a third time ($149 for the lifetime membership I think), which should tell you something about how long they expect even the most committed users to hang around.
Which makes sense. After all, if they do their job, you'll meet someone and not need the app any more, and if they do nothing for you, you'll get tired of them and disappear eventually. Only a very narrow subset of users use the non-hookup focused sites for very long.
The challenge then is that this puts a very severe ceiling on your customer acquisition cost. Who knows what their average lifetime value of a user is, but it's going to be a small fraction of that $149 lifetime membership, with most users never paying anything at all.
If you can make one that is good enough that you don't need to advertise much, you might have a chance, but it's a very tough, very crowded market (for every Tinder and Bumble, there's are hundreds of dating sites which nobody remembers).
Based on conversations with (male) friends, it seems to be the place for those who can't deal with Tinder anymore.
Personally I'm back to OkCupid - it may not have the number of users the others do, but at least I now get to know something about potential matches other than 5 pictures and that they enjoy traveling.
I'm almost certain your comment is tongue-in-cheek, but it did pique my curiosity - what do you think the actual ratio of unwanted explicit photos from each sex is? I have a hard time imagining it being less than 99:1.
There is a lot of DM spam on Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp involving explicit photos of female genitalia that would meet the criteria of obscene material under California's law[1] around sending unsolicited images by electronic means (SB 53).
I have never once received an unwanted nude from a woman but as spam whereas with men it has happened enough times for me to believe without statistical justification that unwanted images of male genitalia would be more common.
It does not matter who owns the body parts in the images. Unwanted genitalia is unwanted genitalia, no matter the sex or the purpose.
I think a lot of unsolicited female genitalia is sent for spam/scam proposes. A particularly pernicious sort is in the form of sextortion [1]. Images of female genitalia may be sent by a criminal to entice a (typically young or teenage) boy into believing he’s engaging in an online romantic relationship with a real girl. When he reciprocates with images of his own body (as requested to do so), the criminal responds by using those images to blackmail him into paying money with the threat of exposing him to friends and family. This sort of attack has also been used to target girls, though recently the targeting of boys has grown much faster. If I had to speculate, criminals likely see young boys as easier targets who can be enticed with images of the female body.
Specially annoying when they use trending topics to tag their unrelated content. It never ocurred to me that I've seen more unsolicited female nudes in Twitter than everywhere else combined, including Reddit and its unsolicited chats.
I suspect it's not just the occurrence rate which influences this feature being male-focussed. It's probably also the expected reception, which is itself a function of the occurrence rate.
If I opened an app one day and received an unsolicited picture of female genitalia, that would be strange. If it happened every day, then it's spam, even if I don't have a strong aversion to it.
The actual ratio will vary as a function of the attractiveness of the recipient. Your average joe probably gets none (or as close to none as statistically possible without actually being none). Your guy who looks like he just walked off a runway in Milan, OTOH, can probably count on getting at least a few a day, if only because they are the focus of so much attention.
I am absolutely in favor of using AI to combat unsolicited nudes as long as it's implemented something like: on the sender's side, show a warning before sending that the image appears to be in bad taste and asking for confirmation, then on the receiver's side, hiding the image behind a warning that it may be unwanted and showing two buttons, "show image" and "unmatch".
This is how Bumble appears to have implemented the feature. Though personally, I'm not going to test it because I think sending unsolicited nudes is a losing strategy for dating.
Yet, as rare as it might be, there are people of both genders who actually enjoy receiving unsolicited nudes. And people who enjoy sexual pickup lines. The judgement call of what is/isn't going to be attractive or appropriate ought be to left in the hands of the individuals dating as much as possible rather than controlled by a priest at a tech company.