Very quick backtrack so as not to continue to have problems with explicit sex. This is what Twitch has done, with an update cancelling what it had decided 48 hours earlier on AI-related full nude images. Faced with continued insistence from streamers, the Amazon-owned streaming platform had announced a softening of guidelines regarding the artistic representation of fictionalized nudity, namely images generated with Generative AI tools.
Twitch’s attempt was to ‘allow the artist community to use their inspiration to unleash their artistic vein’ and to make the Sexual Content Policy ‘easier to understand and enforce’, which many felt was too confusing and limiting.
The immediate (yet predictable) reaction of the steamers was to fill the platform with sexually explicit clips that violated the new policy.
Therefore, Twitch’s first reaction was to activate the moderators to remove the banned content and immediately afterwards to change the policy again with an apology for underestimating the power of GenAI.
Real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch
The spate of overly explicit images caused uproar, protests and concern within the Twitch community, as Dan Clancy, the company’s CEO since March 2023, admitted in the post announcing the backtrack and reinstatement of the old rules. ‘Upon reflection, we have decided that we went too far with this change. Digital depictions of nudity present a unique challenge-AI can be used to create realistic images, and it can be hard to distinguish between digital art and photography‘.
The next step was to reverse the previous decision: ‘Effective today, we are rolling back the artistic nudity changes. Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium‘.
Clancy specified that ‘this restriction does not apply to Mature-rated games’. Aware of having created even more confusion with the cancellation of a new feature released only two days earlier, Clancy also apologised to the entire Twitch community, stating that ‘I wish we had anticipated this outcome, but part of our job is to make changes to serve the community’.
The danger of the deep fakes
After all, the evolution of AI models that generate images in relation to textual requests, and the danger of increasingly sophisticated deepfakes, show how the quality level of such creations is being raised, making it complex to distinguish between real images and videos and those that are invented or manipulated.
This is a problem that goes far beyond Twitch and video streaming platforms, because fake content, sexual and otherwise, has been abounding on social media for some time now. How can we forget, for example, the images of the Pope wearing a white puffer coat: totally fake but made so well that they seemed real.
