For this series of images Klingemann is calling “eroGANous,” he intentionally evolved a generative adversarial network called “BigGAN” for “maximum NSFW-ness.” Klingemann points out, “Tumblr's filter is not happy about them, but it looks like they may still show for a few days.” The complete series can be seen here, for now.

Klingemann sees the use of AI to broadly censor content as problematic as it results in “sterile” content. As he shared with me:

When it comes to freedom, my choice will always be "freedom to" and not "freedom from," and as such I strongly oppose any kind of censorship. Unfortunately in these times, the "freedom from" proponents are gaining more and more influence in making this world a sterile, "morally clean" place in which happy consumers will not be offended by anything anymore. What a boring future to look forward to. Luckily, the current automated censorship engines are more and more employing AI techniques to filter content. It is lucky because the same classifiers that are used to detect certain types of material can also be used to obfuscate that material in an adversarial way so that whilst humans will not see anything different, the image will not trigger those features anymore that the machine is looking for. This will of course start an arms race where the censors will have to retrain their models and harden them against these attacks and the freedom of expression forces will have to improve their obfuscation methods in return.

Klingemann also shared several other projects by artists exploring machine learning and nudity including Artist Jake Elwes’ NSFW machine learning porn, “a 12-minute looped film that records the AI’s pornographic fantasies.” On his website Elwes describes his project as:

A convolutional neural network, an AI, was trained using Yahoo’s explicit content model for identifying pornography, which learnt by being fed a database of thousands of graphic images. The neural network was then re-engineered to generate pornography from scratch.

Both Klingemann and Elwes cite Gabriel Goh’s Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw (heads up, it’s also NSFW) as an early example exploring neural networks and nudity.

And then there are the slightly less pornographic nudes from AI artist Robbie Barrat, which where trained on hundreds of classical nude portraits from art history.