There are plenty of ways to get Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards, but today I learnt that some gamers are renting their idle GPUs for them. Who is paying for the goodies and — most importantly — why, you ask? Well, according to a report on 404 Media, a company named ‘Salad’ is paying the gamers to rent their idle GPUs remotely to their clients creating AI-generated porn.
While the folks over at 404 Media haven’t seen evidence of the images produced by Salad and its network having nonconsensual AI-generated sexual images, they say it’s possible considering Salad has had a client that previously produced such content. In fact, Salad doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it’s possible that participating users may end up generating AI porn with their idle GPUs. Yes, it literally mentions that while you sign up for their service, along with an option to opt-out of renting your machine for such content. Here, take look:
I was able to confirm this by heading to Salad’s website and clicking the button that said “Earn with your GPU.” Doing so will take you to a download page from where you can fetch the program that’ll put your GPU to work. “We recommend NVIDIA GPUs 3080 or later paired with a 4-core or higher CPU,” the page says. It also recommends at least 12GB of RAM to participate in their most profitable jobs.
Earn in gift cards, not cash
As far as the payouts are concerned, Salad doesn’t pay in cash. Instead, it tracks your earnings in dollars and lets you use the money you earned in the Salad store to purchase skins and gift cards. In addition to Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards, you can also choose to “splurge” your earnings on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Valorant, and even Twitch gift cards. Heck, you can even use the money to purchase Grubhub and Deliveroo cards for snacks.
I don’t know about you but I would never rent out my GPU or pretty much any PC component for generating anything, let alone AI porn. It’s more so about ruining your GPU’s health and durability over time as opposed to not wanting to generate content. This is essentially the same as using your GPU to mine crypto, except it’s worse because there is no payday when you work with Salad.
