Reddit’s AI Porn Ban Has A Carveout For Rule 34

The platform now explicitly allows AI-generated porn depicting fictional characters.

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, Midjourney Analogs AI Porn Generators and Engadget.

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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."

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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.