These comics are from the Onion iirc, they’re intentionally shit takes.

Nice. I’ve never played DF but I’ve got a good thousand hours in Rimworld (rookie here obvs). I’m thinking when I get home from work it’s time to update the modlist and waste all of my free time for the next month.

Right, so it’s not like they’re being tricked into generating porn or anything. It’s not some option that they would have turned off if they’d known about it, they just don’t care what’s happening because they only want the reward. Again I’m not saying I agree with it or that Salad’s right to do it, but if they say that’s potentially what it can be used for (and they do because the opt-out is available) then the focus should be on the client companies using the tool for questionable purposes.

They said they did.

However, by default the software settings opt users into generating adult content. An option exists to “configure workload types manually” which enables users to uncheck the “Adult Content Workloads” option (via 404 media), however this is easily missed in the setup process, which I duly tested for myself to confirm.

Honestly, and I’m not saying I support what’s being done here, the way I see it if you’re tech savvy enough to be interested in using a program like this you should be looking through all of the options properly anyway. If users don’t care what they’re doing and are only interested in the rewards that’s kind of on them.

I just think the article is focused on the wrong company, Salad is selling a tool that is being potentially misused by users of their client’s service. I can certainly see why that can be a problem, but based on the information given in the article I don’t think it’s really theirs. If that’s ALL Salad’s used for then that’s a different story.

If I’m reading this right, it’s a program that users sign up for to donate their processing power (and can opt in or out of adult content), which is then used by client companies to generate their own users’ content? It even says that Salad can’t view or moderate the images, so what exactly are they doing wrong besides providing service to potentially questionable companies? It makes as much sense as blaming Nvidia or Microsoft, am I missing something?

Exactly. If I ask someone for a source on something I feel is wrong it’s because I specifically want to know the information they’re working from. If I look it up straight away and send them a link that says they’re wrong straight out of the gate they aren’t even going to open it.