A website that enables the mass production of AI-generated non-consensual sexual images is holding regular competitions with cash prizes to encourage user growth and the proliferation of specialized AI models.
Much like CivitAI, a site a 404 Media investigation covered last week, Tensor.Art allows users to share text-to-image AI models that specialize in producing a certain type of image. These models can be innocuous, like models that specialize in reproducing a certain art style, but many of them are designed to produce highly specific pornography, or the likeness of real people. Often, these models are combined to produce non-consensual sexual images of celebrities.
Tensor.Art, a site that combines a CivitAI-type model sharing platform with a web interface for generating images with those models, launched in May. Its innovation in the growing industry of AI-generated non-consensual sexual images is introducing limited time competitions that reward the people who create these models.
In order to participate, a model creator has to open an account on the site and share their model so that other users can generate images with it. The model that people use most to generate images during a certain time period earns the model creator a reward.
In “Model Budokai,” a Dragon Ball Z-themed competition Tensor.Art ran between July 23 and August 5, creators earned a point every time a user generated an image with their model. If someone who never used Tensor.Art before generated an image with their model, they earned 10 points, placing an emphasis on platform growth. The creators who came in third and second in the competition won $500 and $1,000 respectively, while the top creator won an Nvidia RTX 4090 (retail price $1,600), the kind of powerful graphics card needed to generate these images and models locally.
The strategy appears to be working. The top three winners in the “Model Budokai” competition are all popular creators on CivitAI. A user named Lykon, who is also the most popular creator in the “mature” category on CivitAI, came in first. Meina, another CivitAI user who created a popular AI model on Tensor.Art for generating Hentai, came in third.
In the “Model Budokai” competition the only content rule was that participating models had to be original to Tensor.Art. A competition for August, called “SDXL Bounty,” says that “All submitted Base Models and LORAs must not contain sensitive content such as abuse or celeberities [sic] pornography, child pornography.”
404 Media emailed a Tensor.Art support email listed on its site to clarify whether the stipulation means that neither celebrity or pornographic content is allowed, or just pornographic content of celebrities. That email bounced. 404 Media also reached out to the administrator of the Tensor.Art Discord channel, but did not hear back.
In July, Justin Maier, CivitAI’s founder, said on his Discord server that he had talked to the people behind Tensor.Art and that they “seemed decent enough.”
“They probably just wanted to incentivize engagement on their platform and I respect that they actual[ly] reward creators rather than just taking [their] stuff like a lot of other services do,” he said.
After Tensor.Art introduced these competitions, CivitAI did too, though all competing models on that site have to be “SFW.”
