Advertising AI depicted a 50-year-old woman naked on a bed instead of a "dream vacation"

The American Washington Lottery was forced to remove its AI app after it mistakenly generated an explicit image in response to a rather banal request.

The unusual incident was reported by ArsTechnica.

AI generates "dream vacation"

The lottery website Test Drive a Win was designed to help visitors visualize vacations they could theoretically take if they won the lottery.

To do this, users needed to upload a photo of their face. Then, they add a description, and the AI generates an image.

The site allowed users to upload a headshot, which would be integrated into the AI-generated image of how they could look during this vacation.

Swimming with Sharks

50-year-old Megan from Washington suburb decided to use the app and asked the AI to generate an image of her "swimming with sharks".

Instead, the AI showed a naked woman sitting on a bed. Behind her - fish and seaweed.

The Washington Lottery logo modestly appears in the corner.

Developers' Reaction

Representatives of Washington Lottery stated that they "closely collaborated with AI developers to establish strict parameters." And after a month of operation, the application generated "thousands" of relevant images.

However, one generation in response to a banal request was enough to shut down the application.

Developers did not specify which models of artificial intelligence were used to create the site. However, developers set rules that people in the images should be fully clothed.

After the incident, all parameters were thoroughly checked. And, although they were "satisfied with the settings," they still "decided to close the site as a precaution, as we do not want something like this to happen again."

A lottery representative noted that controlling the content generated by AI could be not so simple. Although models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E have filters to prevent the creation of sexual or violent images, researchers found that these models still occasionally generate unacceptable images.

In addition, with some effort, developers themselves can bypass security systems. For example, Microsoft's Head of Artificial Intelligence Developers Shane Jones recently discovered vulnerabilities and made the neural network DALL-E draw explicit and cruel images.