It’s been reported that some gamers are renting out their idle GPUs to a company called Salad, a middle-man of sorts for Generative AI companies, who then use the accumulated power to create AI-generation porn. In exchange for their willingness to aid in the creation of AI-generated smut, the company pays these gamers in Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards.
Salad isn’t even trying to mask its intentions. Under the Workload Preference sub-section of its support page, the company has an FAQ that provides answers and details about what kind of adult content willing participants and their GPUs are expected to generate, whether or not the AI-generated content it creates will be accessible on the contributor’s PC (it claims such content won’t be), all the way down to the scale of your “earnings”.
Again, Salad won’t pay out a gamer’s earnings in cash but in the entity’s own in-store credit, which contains a wide variety of gift cards, the majority focused on video games and the earlier mentioned Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards. As the company also seems to be based in the US, it also offers gift cards that can be used for food delivery services like Grubhub and Deliveroo, which aren’t applicable to us Malaysians.
But while Salad appears to be open about its intention of AI-generated porn through the use of idle GPU, the company is known for having something of a sordid connection to a company called Civitai, a company that reportedly generated nonconsensual AI porn, both on and off its site. The source of the news, 404 Media, reportedly extensively on that company and even warned one of its partners at the time, OctoML, about their content. Almost immediately after, OctoML terminated its relationship with Civitai.
