I created Erorate.com together with some Discord friends in 2022, shortly after the release of Stable Diffusion v1. We made it to be a site to showcase and rate erotic art created with the help of artificial intelligence.
Back in 2022, AI-generated art was still in its infancy. There were some services available for generating images, but they were heavily limited and censored. Being a closed-source, it wasn’t really advancing either. All that changed with the release of Stable Diffusion v1.
The biggest advantage of Stable Diffusion was that it was an open-source and usable by anyone. The amount of experimentation and creativity within the community was more akin to R&D than what the closed-source services had accomplished in years. Even Google realized this in their famous “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI” leaked memo.
Humans gonna human
The images generated with the help of AI are quite diverse. Some are abstract, some are realistic, some are surreal. Some are beautiful, some are disturbing. Some are erotic, most are not.
Depiction of beauty, eroticism, and sexuality has been a part of art since the dawn of time. Some of the earliest human artifacts are erotic sculptures. From ancient Greek pottery and Japanese explicit woodblock prints to some of the first motion pictures made, human sexuality has been a prominent subject. Given that sexuality is a cornerstone of human experience and crucial for the survival of our species, it’s only natural that it’s a recurring theme in art throughout the ages.
So it’s no surprise that people are using AI to generate erotic art. It’s a natural progression of the technology and the human experience.
‘Humans gonna human’, as the saying goes.
Advertisers hate nipples
I’m old enough to remember the early days of the internet. Back then, the web was wild. Nowadays, it’s sanitized, corporate-controlled, and heavily censored. The platforms that make up most of the web now get most of their revenue from advertising, so they have to play by the advertisers’ rules. And advertisers hate nipples.
Tumblr, Imgur, Reddit, to name a few, are all trying to appeal to advertisers and clamping down on anything they might consider “adult content”. There’s also a strong negative sentiment towards AI from artists and creators (more on that in a future post). Because of this, publishing AI-generated erotic art on these platforms is a double whammy.
Note that I’m not a so-called “free speech absolutist”. There are certain laws that we should follow, which in a way is censorship that I agree with. And to be fair, the platforms have the right to decide what they allow on their platforms, but they should be consistent and transparent about it. My gripe is more about there only being just a few platforms that control most of the web and get to decide what you can and can’t see.
All in all, I miss the old, fractured, and wild web. It’s not coming back, but we can try to carve out a small corner of it for ourselves.
Enter Erorate.com
We created Erorate.com to provide a platform for AI-generated erotic art. A place for people to share and rate the images they create. A community where we can learn together and push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI-generated art.
The core of the site comprises the images themselves. Initially, people guarded their prompts fiercely, so made each image’s prompt is public. This way, people can learn from each other and see how different prompts can lead to vastly different results. As time has gone on and the models have improved, the prompts have become less important and less searched for.
Lately, we added tags to the images using the WD ViT Tagger v3. This improved the site’s usability and made it easier to find similar images. I’m going to write a post about how the tags affect the image scores and which tags are the most popular.
Rating system
While this topic will have an article of its own, I’ll briefly explain the rating system we use on Erorate.com. On the main page, we show the visitor a pair of images and ask them to choose the hotter one. We call this a “duel”. Under the hood, we use the tried and true Elo rating system to calculate the scores. The images are then ranked based on their Elo scores.
At the time of writing, this site holds over ten thousand images and has had over four million duels judged by visitors. I am humbled by these numbers.
Conclusion
I hope this post provided you with some insight into the creation and purpose of Erorate.com. If you have questions reach out to me on Discord or Twitter. I’m always happy to chat about AI, art, and the good old days of the wild web.