When Megan, a 50-year-old mother based in Tumwater, visited the new AI-powered mobile site from Washington’s Lottery on March 30, she thought she was in for some frivolous fun. Test Drive A Win allows users to digitally throw a dart at a dartboard featuring dream vacations you can pay for with the money you win in the lottery. Depending on where the dart lands, you can either upload a headshot or take one on your phone to upload, and the AI superimposes your image into the vacation spot.
Megan landed on a “swim with the sharks” dream vacation option. She was shocked at one of the AI photos Washington’s Lottery spit out. It was softcore porn.
So I can totally see this happening. Government contracts with an genAI company and company drops the ball and erroneously includes the function for pornography or doesn’t select the correctly curated training data (I’m unsure how exactly these work). It may be quite difficult to spot this error by the Washington government is the occurrence rate is very low or none of their test training data prompted pornography to be generated. Perhaps it was only keyed to make porn (when not specifically prompted to) on certain subsets of matched facial features? I’m not suggesting this, but perhaps that affected user looks a lot like a popular porn star? It could also totally be the government’s fault for quickly selecting an AI package and not looking what it could do; but with government bureaucracy there could’ve been quite a few people with oversight.
My bigger question is WTF is this system even doing? If you win money in the lottery, you can select to apply it to a vacation package if your random draw hits it? Why wouldn’t you just take the money and buy your own? Maaaaybe if it heavily discounts the vacations or something. Seems like an unnecessary step in the lottery process.
My bigger question is WTF is this system even doing? If you win money in the lottery, you can select to apply it to a vacation package if your random draw hits it?
No, it’s advertising. They’re trying to convince people to play the lottery so they have you roll a (virtual) wheel and upload a head shot then it generates a theoretical video of what it might look like if you went on that vacation (using your theoretical future winnings). It’s absolutely idiotic, but their target demographic isn’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed to begin with.
they likely aren’t creating the model themselves. the faces are probably all the same AI girl you see everywhere. you gotta be careful with open weight models because the open source image gen community has a… proclivity for porn. there’s not a “function” per se for porn. the may be doing some preprompting or maybe “swim with the sharks” is just too vague of a prompt and the model was just tuned on this kind of stuff. you can add an evaluation network to the end to basically ask “is this porn/violent/disturbing”, but that needs to be tuned as well. most likely it’s even dumber than that where the contractor just subcontracted the whole AI piece and packages it for this use case
So I can totally see this happening. Government contracts with an genAI company and company drops the ball and erroneously includes the function for pornography or doesn’t select the correctly curated training data (I’m unsure how exactly these work). It may be quite difficult to spot this error by the Washington government is the occurrence rate is very low or none of their test training data prompted pornography to be generated. Perhaps it was only keyed to make porn (when not specifically prompted to) on certain subsets of matched facial features? I’m not suggesting this, but perhaps that affected user looks a lot like a popular porn star? It could also totally be the government’s fault for quickly selecting an AI package and not looking what it could do; but with government bureaucracy there could’ve been quite a few people with oversight.
My bigger question is WTF is this system even doing? If you win money in the lottery, you can select to apply it to a vacation package if your random draw hits it? Why wouldn’t you just take the money and buy your own? Maaaaybe if it heavily discounts the vacations or something. Seems like an unnecessary step in the lottery process.
No, it’s advertising. They’re trying to convince people to play the lottery so they have you roll a (virtual) wheel and upload a head shot then it generates a theoretical video of what it might look like if you went on that vacation (using your theoretical future winnings). It’s absolutely idiotic, but their target demographic isn’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed to begin with.
they likely aren’t creating the model themselves. the faces are probably all the same AI girl you see everywhere. you gotta be careful with open weight models because the open source image gen community has a… proclivity for porn. there’s not a “function” per se for porn. the may be doing some preprompting or maybe “swim with the sharks” is just too vague of a prompt and the model was just tuned on this kind of stuff. you can add an evaluation network to the end to basically ask “is this porn/violent/disturbing”, but that needs to be tuned as well. most likely it’s even dumber than that where the contractor just subcontracted the whole AI piece and packages it for this use case