Stripe, a payment processing company valued at $50 billion which refuses to do business with anyone in the adult industry, is currently profiting from AI-generated non-consensual porn.
Last month, 404 Media reported on two websites that make it easy to use text-to-image AI tools to generate sexual images of anyone. One site, CivitAI, allows users to share Stable Diffusion models, many of which have been modified to convincingly replicate the likeness of celebrities, Instagram influencers, politicians, athletes, and YouTubers. Other models on CivitAI have been modified to generate images of extremely specific sex acts or aesthetics by scraping data from adult Reddit communities or professional porn videos. Both types of models can, and often have been, combined to create non-consensual sexual images of real people.
The other site, Mage.Space, offers a simple web user interface that allows anyone to generate non-consensual sexual images of celebrities, sometimes by using the same models on CivitAI, by simply typing in a prompt naming specific people and sex acts. Mage.Space only allows users who pay for a subscription at $4 or $15 a month to generate sexual images. CivitAI itself also collects donations, and offers a $5 a month membership that gives users early access to new features and unique badges for their usernames on the site and Discord. Non-consensual sexual images are against Mage.Space and Discord’s terms of use, but it’s still a highly popular genre of AI created content on both platforms.
Both sites collect payments through Stripe. That means that whenever someone gives money to Mage.Space for the explicit purpose of generating sexual images, Stripe gets a cut. Stripe’s standard rate is 2.9 percent of every transaction plus a flat $.30 fee per transaction.
“Limiting sex workers' ability to access their funds while simultaneously lining the pockets of those who exploit them is unfortunately an all too common occurrence in our (sex workers') industry,” GoAskAlex, an adult performer who promotes her work in some of the Reddit communities that are scraped by CivitAI users to create non-consensual sexual images, told me. “The same politicians and corporate investors who strip us of our rights are, more often than not, the first to utilize our work for their own gain - personal, financial, and sexual.”
“When we think of mitigation strategies, we should be asking why internet infrastructure (cloud computing, cloud flare, domain names) and financial infrastructures (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal) support and profit from these services,” Hany Farid, an image forensics expert and professor at University of California, Berkeley told me.
“Mage stands against harmful non-consensual deepfake imagery, and this behavior is forbidden on Mage via our Terms Of Service,” Gregory Hunkins, Mage’s cofounder, told 404 Media. At the time of writing, 404 Media could still easily find non-consensual AI-generated sexual images just by typing the name of a celebrity and a sex act into Mage’s search bar. Images we saw when we first published our investigations were still on the site as well.
Stripe did not respond to multiple requests for comment and detailed questions sent via email. When I reached Stripe support via Twitter direct message, the account asked me to confirm which email I had used to contact the company. When I gave my email address, the account stopped responding to questions despite multiple attempts.
Stripe is an increasingly popular online payment processor. (Stripe is natively integrated into Ghost, the platform 404 Media is using, for example.) If you are a paying subscriber to this website, you have used Stripe. The business model is simple: Stripe facilitates the payment, taking money from users and depositing into a Stripe account, who can then transfer it to a bank account.
The cruel hypocrisy of Stripe continuing to do business with sites like Mage and CivitAI is that its publicly stated policy is extremely clear about not doing business with any “adult content and services.”
Specifically it lists the following types of businesses:
- Pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts
- Adult services including prostitution, escorts, pay-per view, sexual massages, and adult live chat features
- Adult video stores
- Gentleman's clubs, topless bars, and strip clubs
- Online dating services
“It's surprising to hear that Stripe would tolerate what is essentially revenge porn, given that Stripe has, historically, been one of the most aggressive censors of consensual adult content in the digital payment space,” Mike Stabile, director of public affairs at the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association that protects the rights and freedoms of people in the adult industry, told me. “In a report we did earlier this year, nearly a quarter of adult workers and businesses reported a ban from Stripe, and even that underrepresents how aggressive they are, given that most sex workers avoid it in the first place. So it's a slap in the face to ban sex workers while profiting off sales on AI platforms that exploit their images.”
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As Stabile explained, Stripe is not alone in discriminating against sex workers. Credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard also discriminate against sex workers, and in 2020 stopped processing payments to Pornhub entirely. The ACLU recently urged the FTC in a complaint to investigate Mastercard’s discrimination against sex workers. And of course, as any sex worker who must use the internet to make a living will tell you, all the social media platforms discriminate against their content and profession, some more severely than others.
“By not allowing sex workers to use Stripe, it pushes them to platforms and payment systems that take dramatically higher percentages of their income—essentially exiling them to a financial red light district where their work can be financially exploited,” Stabile said. “Adult creators would love to use Stripe, because they could not only keep more of their money, they could work independent of platforms, and sell directly to fans.”
In Stripe’s case, this also creates an environment where sex workers can’t make money from their consensual labor, but people who steal their work and exploit it to create non-consensual sexual images, can.
Update 9/13/23 12:35 PM: This article has been updated with comment from Mage.
