It’s no secret that one of the things that AI users love using chatbots for is cranking out smut. These prompts, though, are far from private.According to a new scoop from 404 Media, hundreds of human contractors who were hired to improve Microsoft’s Copilot AI are reviewing users’ image editing prompts and the photos that they upload. And many of these workers say they’re being inundated with dark and sexually explicit requests.Judging the ethics of these requests, though, was beyond the contractors’ remit. Their job, per the reporting, was purely to evaluate how well the Copilot AI fulfilled a prompt, such as whether it enlarged a woman’s breasts enough. And they were do to this, Microsoft instructed in documents obtained by 404, by relying on their “intuition.”Some said they were asked to evaluate upskirt photos of women, or reviewed prompts designed to put women in sexual scenarios. Other depraved prompts were for children’s cartoon characters, or shortening a real woman’s skirt.“Faces are always uncensored, and many of the prompts are sexual in nature and dubiously consensual,” one person who works on the prompts and who chose to remain anonymous told 404. It’s another example of the hidden human element that AI companies employ to run and improve their tech, the existence of which isn’t made clear to the public. The average user assumes that their conversations aren’t being viewed by other people, except for maybe moderation purposes — and if they aren’t doing anything wrong, what’s to worry about? 404 also reported recently how OpenAI, in a similar practice, was hiring hundreds of employees to read users’ prompts so it could improve the chatbot’s responses.Privacy concerns are just the tip of the iceberg. AI tools are commonly being used to generate sexual content that’s nonconsensual, if not illegal, of women and sometimes even children. Human contractors, who often aren’t paid well, are expected to view this disturbing and even traumatizing content.In an internal message board, one worker said they “recoiled” after reviewing pro-anorexia content. Another said they saw a prompt that seemed intended to create a lewd image of a group of young girls. Workers complained that they often had no warning that they were about to view these disturbing requests.“I just came across an image set that consisted of eight upskirt photos,” the contractor wrote, asking superiors to flag the content as unsafe. Another said they saw images of “some sort of animal sacrifice.”It got bad enough that some questioned the entire nature of their jobs.“Who is writing these prompts and who is deciding that basically generating porn is what Copilot is now focused on?” wrote another contractor. “It’s hard to take things seriously when my focus has to be what model generated the appropriate bust size or which middle aged woman was put in the appropriate sexually suggestive position.”More on AI: People Are Telling Their Darkest Thoughts to AI Without Realizing They Can Easily Become PublicThe post Human Contractors Are Seeing All Your Horny — and Creepy — AI Prompts appeared first on Futurism.