The NUCA is a camera that uses AI to turn any photograph of a person into a nude. Sounds gross, and it is, but that's the point. The purpose of this art project is to highlight how easy it already is to create nonconsensual pornography.
The current NUCA prototype is a 3D-printed camera with a 37mm wide angle lens. When it takes a picture, it sends it to a server that uses a classifier Vef and Groß made that analyzes the picture to describe the subject in text: their gender, age, race, etc. That text is then used to generate a prompt that is fed to a Stable Diffusion text-to-image AI image generator, which along with a model from Civitai, is used to produce the nude body. The camera also uses an open source "one-click" face swap tool to add the face from the photograph into the resulting AI-generated image.
The results are kind of goofy. The nudes that are generated are superhero shiny, ridiculous exaggerations of what the human body might look like without supposed imperfection, based on identifying features like age, race, gender. So, if the results look like stereotypes, it's because they are. I'd expect nothing less of a program trained on other idealized nudes. This project and it's satirical promotional material aims to highlight that content creation like this is already readily available. In other words, it's not putting any new ideas out there.
"I think this is actually the opposite," Groß said. "We're not putting it out there. With this twist that is an object that's a camera we really tie people who are photographed and the person whose picture is being taken together in the same space and with that we had really, really interesting conversations. I think this is maybe the most valuable bit."
Emanuel Maiberg, 404Media
