Unstable Diffusion

Unstable Diffusion is a Discord community dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) generated NSFW content using an unrestricted version of the open source AI image tool Stable Diffusion. Starting in 2022, it has been trending in a small section of the art generation community where the users create and share illustrations and AI-generated photographs considered pornographic or horror-themed. Many images include grotesque nude figures due to the system's lack of understanding of the human body.

During November 2022, the server's Patreon, used for running costs and development, had already surpassed the $2,500 a month from hundreds of donors.

With the decision to open-source Stable Diffusion, communities from the field of AI had the opportunity to experiment and develop new innovations with it, including adult-only content. Although the model did include protection against the generation of nudity or gore, it became possible to remove these guardrails when the full code of the AI model was released.

While Stability AI's tool has a training dataset of 2.3 billion images, only around 2.9% of those contain NSFW material. This limits the quality of the output for explicit content. Unstable Diffusion attempts to develop a more robust porn dataset, fine-tuning the algorithm. This has been done with the help of volunteers from its Discord server.

According to Arman Chaudhry, CEO of Equilibrium AI and one of the members of the Unstable Diffusion admin team, "In just two months, our team expanded to over 13 people as well as many consultants and volunteer community moderators. (…) We see the opportunity to make innovations in usability, user experience and expressive power to create tools that professional artists and businesses can benefit from.”

An unofficial Unstable Diffusion Beginner's guide is available here.

Discord Community

The Unstable Diffusion server is host to a range of AI-generated NSFW imagery in different art styles, sexual preferences, and kinks. These include a "men-only" channel, a softcore and “safe for work” stream, channels for hentai and furry artwork, a BDSM and “kinky things” subgroup, and a channel dedicated exclusively to “nonhuman” nudes.

Users can use the system's bot to generate art in the specific theme of choice, opting to submit their favorite results to a "starboard."

According to Unstable Diffusion, there have been upwards of 4,375,000 images generated, with the group hosting competitions "that challenge members to recreate images using the bot, the results of which are used in turn to improve Unstable Diffusion’s models."

Development

Unstable Diffusion started in August 2022, after the release of the Stable Diffusion model. It was initially a Subreddit, migrating to Discord afterwards and gaining tens of thousands of members. These initial communities in Reddit and 4chan started experimenting with generating realistic and anime-style images of nude characters. A server admin from Unstable Diffusions' Discord mentioned, at the time, that their goal was "To provide support for people interested in making NSFW,” and that "Because the only community currently working on this is 4chan, we hope to provide a more reasonable community which can actually work with the wider AI community.”

Although in the beginning it was mainly a place for sharing AI-generated porn and also methods to bypass the content filters of image-generating models, it quickly developed into a group seeking to build their own AI system for NSFW image generation from open source tools. Stable Diffusion was seen as a perfect fit. Even though this model wasn't specifically developed for NSFW image generation, Stability AI allowed developers to customize their tool.

To start, the Unstable Diffusion admins released a Discord bot based on the regular version of Stable Diffusion, letting users generate pornographic images through text prompts. The results were less than satisfactory, with misplaced limbs and distorted genitalia due to the small percentage (2.9%) of Stable Diffusion's dataset containing NSFW material. The next step was the recruitment of volunteers to create NSFW datasets for fine-tuning Stability AI's model.

Besides the custom model applied has a Discord bot, the team started development on a web app that allow people to follow AI-generated porn from specific users.

Kickstarter campaign

The Unstable Diffusion group started a Kickstarter campaign. It ended on the 21st of December 2022, when Kickstarter shut down the campaign. It at raised more than $56,000 from 867 backers from an initial $25,000 goal. Since the crowdfunding platform follow an all-or-nothing model, the money was returned to the funders.

The action by Kickstarter came after some artists pressured the company into dropping the Unstable Diffusion project due to concern about the effect that AI art generator can have on artists' careers. Arman Chaudhry, CEO of Unstable Diffusion, said "Kickstarter’s capitulation to a loud subset of artists disappoints us, we and our supporters will not back down from defending the freedom to create.” Their website was updated to allow supporters to contribute to the project directly.

Ethics and Safety

The concerns and ethical questions around Unstable Diffusion are the same as with other AI-generating models. However, due to the NSFW nature of its content, it has added issues. According to TechCrunch, "While the use of AI to create porn isn’t new, [..] Unstable Diffusion’s models are capable of generating higher-fidelity examples than most. The generated porn could have negative consequences particularly for marginalized groups, the ethicists say, including the artists and adult actors who make a living creating porn to fulfill customers’ fantasies."

Other common issues are the possibility of celebrity NSFW images, creating images that may show a real person doing something compromising and the model's training dataset using images from artists that did not give their consent and that could be associated with porn.

However, Unstable Diffusion's goal is to be an "ethical" community, prohibiting content like child pornography, deepfakes and excessive gore. The Discord server has terms of service that users must follow and submit their images to moderation. The server also has a filter that block images containing people that are in a database.

Future

Equilibrium AI, the company Unstable Diffusion is part of, is funding other projects, including Waifu Diffusion which is fine-tuned on anime images. The company's CEO believes that Unstable Diffusion will evolve into an organization supporting other AI-powered content generation, sponsoring developers, and providing tools and resources to help with the development of other systems.