Reddit’s AI porn ban has a carveout for Rule 34

Reddit has crushed the biggest protest in its history. What’s next? Make AI-generated porn legal again, apparently — as long as it’s not deepfaked. Today, Reddit has added an explicit carveout to its Content Policy that allows “AI-generated sexual media that depicts fictional people or characters.”

Some backstory: In 2018, Reddit was among the many platforms that banned deepfake AI porn communities, declaring that “involuntary pornography” was not okay. Specifically, Reddit modified its Rule 3 to ban depictions of nudity or sexual contact “that may have been faked.”

But as of 2018, Reddit left an explicit carveout for porn distributed with a sexual worker’s consent — and today, Reddit has added another carveout for AI-generated sexual media.

Here’s the new part, in bold:

Note that the rule does not apply to media distributed commercially with the consent of those depicted, AI-generated sexual media that depicts fictional people or characters, or artistic depictions (e.g., cartoons, anime, etc.) – although keep in mind our rules regarding respecting the intellectual property of others.

“[S]exually explicit AI-generated content violates our rules if it depicts a real, identifiable person,” the company clarified today.

Mind you, Rule 3 isn’t the only Reddit rule keeping Midjourney and Stable Diffusion-alikes from blasting NSFW AI content all over the platform. Rule 6 requires that Reddit communities label sexually explicit and / or offensive content, to the point it generally stays within opt-in NSFW communities. And Rule 4 prohibits sexual or suggestive content involving minors, fictional or not.

Speaking of Rule 4, it got an adjustment today as well: “Do not share content depicting or promoting neglect, physical, or emotional abuse against minors.” Minor abuse is a brand-new category of depiction that Reddit doesn’t tolerate.

Technically speaking, intellectual property rules should also keep many fictional AI-unclothed characters from appearing on Reddit. But enforcing that is tough: IP rights have generally not stopped Rule 34 (which is not a Reddit rule, BTW) in the past.