A website that asks men to decide whether they would have sex with different AI-generated women has sparked backlash online.
Known as “SmashOrPassAI,” the service was introduced on Saturday by Harvard University alumnus Emmet Halm.
“Introducing SmashOrPassAI, a generative AI party game,” Halm tweeted. “No further explanation needed. You know what to do, boys.”
The game is based largely on FaceMash, a service created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2003 while he studied at Harvard. FaceMash compared photos of students at the college and asked users to decide who was more physically attractive. Similar services such as “Hot or Not,” launched in late 2000, likewise asked users to decide whether a featured individual was attractive.
Halm further explained on Twitter that SmashOrPassAI will in later versions be “a recursively self-improving system,” meaning the more a user swipes, the more the site’s AI learns what they find alluring.
“The goal is to create the most addicting & personalized image recommendation system. V1 is as simple as possible,” Halm continued. “Future versions trained on current data will enable even more personalized images & user interaction in image generation. Coming soon!”
Halm’s creation, however, quickly drew mixed reactions, with many suggesting that the concept was dated.
“bro wtf is this. The concept of finetuning your aesthetic GenAI image tool is cool but you definitely could have done it with literally any other category to prove the concept, like food, interior design, landscapes, etc.”
In response, Halm argued that users were significantly more likely “to swipe on hot images than plants.”
Others questioned whether Halm had put any actual thought into what he was creating prior to launch.
“Begging techbros to think about the things they make for, like, 10 seconds before jumping in,” another person said. “Because what the actual fuck is wrong with you?”
Many also responded by jokingly suggesting other services such as “LiarOrNotLiarAI” and “GayOrNotGayAI.”
But one user went one step further and created an actual service intended to highlight a service that women would use. The site, created by MIT student Rona Wang, is known as “FriendOrFoeAI.”
“Men worry about how hot a girl is, women worry about how dangerous a guy is,” she wrote. “Introducing FriendOrFoeAI.”
The site states that the service, which merely shuffles through a set of pictures just like SmashOrPassAI, is “designed to emulate the split-second decisions that women need to make.”
Wang clarified that the site does not collect any data and isn’t actually training an AI model. The service instead aims to send a message.
Despite the complaints, Halm appears undeterred. The Harvard alumnus even responded to Wang’s creation by calling it “legendary.”
Halm is not the first to use AI to create a service for rating women. Numerous other versions exist, although have garnered less attention.
Regardless, the site is furthering debate on ethics in AI given that the technology is being used to make women appear nude or in pornographic films.
