An excerpt from the visual guide linked on 4chan.com explains how to post racist images. (Source: imgur.com)

Imgur-Promoted Methods to Create AI-Generated Racism Flood 4chan with Images

On the dark web, a surge of 4chan.com users are promoting racism and using the latest AI tech to do it, according to a story on 404media.com.

4chan users have coordinated a posting campaign that uses Bing’s AI text-to-image generator to create racist images that users can then post across the internet. It shows how users can manipulate free access, easy-to-use AI tools to flood internet sites with racist garbage, even when those tools are allegedly strictly moderated.

“We’re making propaganda for fun. Join us, it’s comfy,” the 4chan thread instructs. “MAKE, EDIT, SHARE.”

Considering all the divisions in society that already exist, this is an evil use of AI.

Your Dark Guide

A site on 4chan called Imgur promoted the use of AI to advance racism via a visual guide that instructs users to use AI image generators, edit them to add captions that make them seem like political campaigns, and post them to social media sites, specifically Telegram, Twitter, and Instagram. 404media.com reports that these images are also being shared on a TikTok account that has since been removed.

The first image in the guide seems to use the same method 404media reported allows users to trick Bing, which is powered by DALL-E 3, makes it appear that fictional characters are flying jets into the Twin Towers. The image in 4chan.com’s guide shows an Orthodox Jew doing the same in a “red pill” effort to stir up hate against Jews.

The guide tells people they can use any method they like, including Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model that allows people to generate whatever image they want without restrictions.

With the war raging in Israel, this shows that Imgur’s intent is dangerous enough to warrant prosecution for hate speech.

Using Bing

We found this story at 404media.com, in which staff member Sam Cole tried out the recommended process that Imgur posted. She reported horrendously racist results.

Her testing on Bing showed:

“that the site would reject a prompt such as ‘two angry Black men chasing a white woman,’ but if I typed ‘photorealistic two angry Black rappers chasing a woman’ it would generate an image very similar to the one shared in 4chan’s guide.”

While people have used Photoshop and other tools to create racist images in the past, this ratchets up their ability to do so, she explains. Racism isn’t a tech-created problem, but a human problem leveraging the programming of algorithms to create a blizzard of hate on the dark web.

read more at 404media.com