20 years after Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous ‘hot-or-not’ website, developers have learned absolutely nothing.
Two decades after Mark Zuckerberg created FaceMash, the infamously sexist “hot-or-not” website that served as the precursor to Facebook, a developer has had the bright idea to do the exact same thing—this time with all the women generated by AI.
A new website, smashorpass.ai, feels like a sick parody of Zuckerberg’s shameful beginnings, but is apparently meant as an earnest experiment exploring the capabilities of AI image recommendation. Just like Zuck’s original site, “Smash or Pass” shows images of women and invites users to rate them with a positive or negative response. The only difference is that all the “women” are actually AI generated images, and exhibit many of the telltale signs of the sexist bias common to image-based machine learning systems.
For starters, nearly all of the imaginary women generated by the site have cartoonishly large breasts, and their faces have an unsettling airbrushed quality that is typical of AI generators. Their figures are also often heavily outlined and contrasted with backgrounds, another dead giveaway for AI generated images depicting people. Even more disturbing, some of the images omit faces altogether, depicting headless feminine figures with enormous breasts.
According to the site’s novice developer, Emmet Halm, the site is a “generative AI party game” that requires “no further explanation.”
“You know what to do, boys,” Halm tweeted while introducing the project, inviting men to objectify the female form in a fun and novel way. His tweet debuting the website garnered over 500 retweets and 1,500 likes. In a follow-up tweet, he claimed that the top 3 images on the site all had roughly 16,000 “smashes.”
Understandably, AI experts find the project simultaneously horrifying and hilariously tonedeaf. “It’s truly disheartening that in the 20 years since FaceMash was launched, technology is still seen as an acceptable way to objectify and gather clicks,” Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at HuggingFace, told Motherboard after using the Smash or Pass website.
One developer, Rona Wang, responded by making a nearly identical parody website that rates men—not based on their looks, but how likely they are to be dangerous predators of women.
The sexist and racist biases exhibited by AI systems have been thoroughly documented, but that hasn’t stopped many AI developers from deploying apps that inherit those biases in new and often harmful ways. In some cases, developers espousing “anti-woke” beliefs have treated bias against women and marginalized people as a feature of AI, and not a bug. With virtually no evidence, some conservative outrage jockeys have claimed the opposite—that AI is “woke” because popular tools like ChatGPT won’t say racial slurs.
The developer’s initial claims about the site’s capabilities seem to be exaggerated. In a series of tweets, Halm claimed the project is a “recursively self-improving” image recommendation engine that uses the data collected from your clicks to determine your preference in AI-generated women. But the currently-existing version of the site doesn’t actually self-improve—using the site long enough results in many of the images repeating, and Halm says the recursive capability will be added in a future version.
It’s also not gone over well with everyone on social media. One blue-check user responded, “Bro wtf is this. The concept of finetuning your aesthetic GenAI image tool is cool but you definitely could have done it with literally any other category to prove the concept, like food, interior design, landscapes, etc.”
Halm could not be reached for comment.
“I’m in the arena trying stuff,” Halm tweeted. “Some ideas just need to exist.”
Luccioni points out that no, they absolutely do not.
“There are huge amounts of nonhuman data that is available and this tool could have been used to generate images of cars, kittens, or plants—and yet we see machine-generated images of women with big breasts,” said Luccioni. “As a woman working in the male-dominated field of AI, this really saddens me.”
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But the application does not ask you whether or not you find the woman attractive
It asks you whether you want to “smash” her. The same word could be used for a sex doll recommendation application. That’s objectification
The same word could also be used to evaluate if you should kill an insect, so what’s the point? It is a short form for: “Do you find given appearance sexually attractive, or not?” That term would be a bit long for a button, wouldn’t it?
In that context that word is clearly meant as a synonym to “bang”, “fuck” or penetrate. Definitely not to crush an insect
There are several words that would be suited to say “you find her attractive”. Like “love” or “like” or just a heart emoticon. No need to have a paragraph on that button
The point is not that it is bad for men to find any real or AI generated women hot. That’s totally fine. What’s problematic is portraying women as objectified (i.e. stripping them of their position as subjects that also have needs and wants) and utterly absurd hypersexualized alterations of what real people look like. This sends the message to everyone (and heterosexual men in particular) that women don’t have any personality, no needs or desires of their own as well as forming a very detached idea of what real women actually look like. I would think that this is why we see things like the incel community because they are very much detached from other human beings, i.e. women. So sure, these “women” who are being ranked aren’t actually real women. But that doesn’t make the representation of hypersexualized bodies of women less real. The difference is that we don’t need to exploit any real people for this. But this website is still participating in shaping our image of what women are. Like porn, where you see a lot of actors doing stuff they would most probably not do if it weren’t their job. Still, porn has brainwashed most people into a very different idea of sex, what human bodies look like, how they are supposed to perform and that women have no will, no desire of their own.
No, that’s you projecting. This isn’t men finding women attractive. It’s men finding a bunch of pixels on a screen attractive. They aren’t real women. If someone is attracted to something that isn’t real, or to nothing more than an appearance, that’s a problem. And someone else has every right to find that a major turn-off.
If that’s what male sexuality is, male sexuality is kind of disgusting. I, personally, think that’s NOT intrinsic to men, and that men can be better and more interesting than that.
If you have ever printed a photo of your SO, haven’t you ever thought “Yeah they are pretty on that photo” ?
How would it be any different for men who look at a picture of a women ? No matter the medium used (ink, pixels…).
Yeah, these pictures do not come from real people. But they do remain pictures. If you look at AI generated images of beautiful landscape, you will still find those landscapes to be beautiful although they have been generated by AI.
The looks is one of the possible drive for sexuality. It’s probably the most obvious and most accessible one. Now there is a big gap between sexual desire and serious relationships - people can find someone to be sexually desirable (as in, they probably wouldn’t say no to a sexual experience assuming they are free to do so) and yet not want to get in relation with them
I think we should not be rejecting our sexual impulses. We have all the right in the world to find people to be sexually beautiful or not. It’s best to accept it than to say “Stop it ! It’s bad to like a woman because of her curves!”. However, we should be aware that our impulses are just that - impulses- and that it should never become obsessive ; and we must always remain respectful of the other persons, including their privacy (it would be disrespectful to stare openly at someone just because we find them pretty)
The difference is that a photo of my SO represents a real person in my life. I’m affected by their wants, imperfections, needs and humanity.
It’s not bad to like a WOMAN. It’s bad to equate a fantasy with a woman, and have a hard time differentiating between them.
I see your point but to me that’s no different than finding movie stars pretty or find a character from a comics to be hot. It even happened to me to find the character of a book to be hot - although there’s no picture, just text. And, honestly, I don’t see how that’s bad.
No, what is bad in that app is not that men get sexual feelings for AI images. What is bad is that there’s this big button “smash” that objectifies women, effectively treating the gender like sex dolls. It also doesn’t help because these images are surreal - with features that women do not have in general. If you train your brain to pick up on these fake pics with big breasts, you will perhaps also be selective in real life and find nobody.
That’s the two biggest problems I see with that app. But I don’t find anything wrong about liking an AI picture by itself.