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Playboy image from 1972 gets ban from IEEE computer journals (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 7 months ago (9 children)

This is not a hill I'd want to die on, but I do understand thinking this photo is fine. If I hadn't been told it was from Playboy, I wouldn't give it a second thought. It's a conventionally-attractive woman in a hat showing a little shoulder. I wouldn't be upset over Michaelangelo's David either. It is less sexual than like 90% of modern TV or mass-market advertising. I suspect a similar image of "cleaner" provenance would not garner much attention at all, honestly.

But it is weird that an image from such a source was chosen in the first place. It is understandable that it makes people uncomfortable, and it seems like there should be no shortage of suitable imagery that wouldn't, so...easy sell, I'd think.

On a related note, boy oh boy am I tired of every imagegen AI paper and project using the same type of vaguely fetishized portraits as examples.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Apparently the team making the first scanner needed a good test photo and that was the best they had on hand at that moment in terms of color variation and intensity.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Which is still weird.

Alexander Sawchuk, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California ... along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper. ... Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy. The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Everything about the story sounds like it was a rush job, a decision made on a whim, after exhausting their existing catalog of test images. And who bring a Playboy mag to their university's computer lab, and advertises their possession? They don't even say who it was, probably to protect them from any embarrassing professional consequences. To me, that's probably the strongest reason to retire it: it's unprofessional.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 months ago

And who bring a Playboy mag to their university's computer lab, and advertises their possession?

Probably a random grad student. They were just coming out of the "sexual revolution" of the 60s at that point. It'd be a lot weirder ten years earlier or ten years later.

That a similar thing did happen ten years earlier is the weird part, I think.

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