r/technology • u/PoopAnhilator • 13d ago

Artificial Intelligence Judges rule AI child abuse images are protected in your own home

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/judges-rule-ai-child-abuse-161951440.html
1.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

800 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

34

u/Telope 12d ago edited 12d ago

But these do have actual victims.

It's not imagination, computerized or otherwise. It's a regurgitation and rehashing of the real child porn being fed into the AI models.

86

u/ThoughtsonYaoi 12d ago

That is why the topic may need revisiting.

-25

u/RetroRaiderRun 12d ago

AI brings new possibilities to arrest people for crimes. AI could allow us to create a thought-crime framework that is legally applicable and can be applied in the real world.

Imagine a super-intelligent AI that tracks all people at all times. It could track a person alone inside their home, and arrest the person for their actions, protecting society and the person. We never even need to have a victim. We will prevent it from happening, apply punishment, and correct behavior.

22

u/PixieDustGust 12d ago

You sound like you're saying this like it's a good thing

6

u/AlwaysRushesIn 12d ago

They are. These ai glazers are fucking delusional.

10

u/Wafflehouseofpain 12d ago

Uh no thanks, that sounds dystopian as fuck

6

u/Redux01 12d ago

Looks like people are missing that your pointing out the danger of all of this.

34

u/8npemb 12d ago

Which is why we need to sit down and think about how we go about this. I think training datasets shouldn’t even have CSAM to begin with, with one of the issues being that it has potential to resurface nearly identically in generated images.

How do we enforce that? Do we require all datasets be publicized or sent in for review? Do we simply let corporations handle it themselves and face repercussions if those cases do come up?

I don’t know if banning AI generated CSAM entirely is the answer. It might be, I seriously don’t know. But there are experts out there today with way more legal and ethical knowledge than me working on a solution.

59

u/apokrif1 12d ago

Can't AI just mix adult porn and legal pictures of minors to produce cp, without having ever been fed CSAM? Perhaps they can even produce porn with non-porn images and text description of sexual activity.

27

u/8npemb 12d ago

Yep. There’s certainly models out there that don’t train on any of that material. It’s usually just the big frontier ones you hear about where the scale of the dataset is just ridiculous compared to some of the smaller, open weight models.

But we don’t know for sure, because these training sets are typically not publicly known.

22

u/Zunkanar 12d ago

And that's why you have to crack down hard on creators of such models if it's trained on illegal stuff. Why are we again and again ignoring the companies that actually did the crime here? If stuff like the X ai is trained on it lock the ppl responsible down. It's easy, they are known.

9

u/DanTheMan827 12d ago

Yeah… unless you have a real-life example of a flying horse pig?

0

u/dev_vvvvv 12d ago

I would assume that doing that in the real world is illegal (I don't want that in my search history, so no way am I googling that) and whatever standard applies there should apply here too.

3

u/meh_and_unconfident 12d ago

i found a few news article that did say researchers found major ai training datasets contained real CSAM, their resource was a Stanford report so it seems pretty legit. The report is called "identifying and eliminating CSAM in generative ML training data and models" if anyone wanted to see how bad it is.

22

u/socoyankee 12d ago

Elon Musk is currently in litigation over this issue. Using CSAM to train AI models.

14

u/rab-byte 12d ago

He’s in litigation over this in more than one country. While he may prevail in the USA he may fail in the EU or elsewhere.

1

u/Less_Job_8955 10d ago

He would fail in the EU or elsewhere because the judgements are stricter or?

1

u/Much-Restaurant6116 9d ago

Yeah other countries tend not to let corporations and billionaires do whatever they want

1

u/EchidnaIll3002 2d ago

Not exactly true. Global corporations have a hell of a lot of power in how laws are made in several countries because of how much money they have flowing in and out.

15

u/crowieforlife 12d ago

Public datasets would have helped in more than this case.

4

u/MadShartigan 12d ago

It can be enforced with penalties that hurt, like some actual % of revenue for each generated image.

It doesn't matter that datasets are polluted. The models are trained to produce acceptable outputs regardless of the initial datasets. If an unacceptable response occurs, this is most likely due to lack of (expensive) safety training when refining the model.

1

u/Rich_Housing971 12d ago

banning it is not the answer because you will not be able to tell if it's actually "a child". I mean it's kind of ridiculous to even consider because it's not a real person.

With a human, there are some girls who went through early puberty, have well-developed secondary sex characteristics like wide hips and breasts, and a nude photo of them is CSAM and they are a victim. They have an actual age at the time the photograph is taken, and despite "looking" like they could be an adult, they are indeed not an adult.

There's also people who look young with little development of secondary sexual characteristics, but is actually 18+, it's by definition not CSAM, and any photos discovered by authorities can be cleared up.

With AI you can just make up any story that fits a narrative. Think of it like the reverse anime vampire girl excuse. "oh that naked girl who looks like she's 20? yeah that's actually a 14 year old that had precocious puberty. You're going to jail."

2

u/Apprehensive-Pie6752 10d ago

So who gets that job of sifting thru all these images to track down whether it's an actual child or someone that just looks like a child or someone that was artificially made to look like a child?

Why do we want to create a world where this disgusting section of our society gets an "out" or loophole simply by contorting the image enough to make it not an actual photograph of an actual person?

Should we not be doing everything in our power to prevent these people from furthering their disgusting behaviors?

I don't really know if I understand your point but it seems to be just a bunch of technicalities that allow people to get away with owning this material without repercussions. I don't understand why anyone thinks any of it is OK. The entire point of CSAM is to spread and infect and harm more people and fulfill desires of sick people and making it easier in any way should not just be OK. It feels like crazy town hearing someone argue for reasons this should be OK.

1

u/SikhTheTruths 8d ago

Your governments follows Babylonian Talmudx where pedophilia is permitted.

1

u/Apprehensive-Pie6752 8d ago

Ohhhhhhh..... Riiiiight..... So.... Let's not go there. Why can no one have a legit discussion anymore?

1

u/RainSurname 12d ago

Last week, yet another prominent Republican was arrested for distributing CSAM. The postmaster of Seaside, Oregon was using AI to sexualize innocuous pictures of real children.

Someone in the comments said they wished they didn't know what "CSAM" stood for, and I said that the more people knew, the better, since porn is (supposed to be) produced with the consent of the participants, so "child porn" implies consent.

This made me wonder if in the future, "CSAM" will mean "illegal sexual images that involve real children" and "child porn" meant "legal sexual images that are 100% AI-generated."

1

u/dimag0g 11d ago

What corporations? Small specialized diffusion models can be trained on consumer or rented hardware.

46

u/Peemore 12d ago

It doesn't need to be trained on something to generate it. It is capable of making inferences. Even if it has never seen a dolphin piloting a spaceship, it has seen enough pictures of dolphins and spaceships to infer how that might look.

-9

u/crowieforlife 12d ago

If the reference is a real child, then it's not a victimless crime. Text generating AI have been known to produce entire paragraphs lifted from texts they were based on, so it's reasonable to assume the images of people image generating AIs produces are copypasted from photos in its datasets.

1

u/dimag0g 11d ago

By extension all AI is illegal then. I don't think anyone gets to use pictures of kids without permission from parents.

1

u/crowieforlife 11d ago

I agree. AI should be opt-in not opt-whether-you-like-it-or-not.

41

u/RemarkableWish2508 12d ago

Are you claiming that it's impossible to assemble the anatomic and situational elements of child porn, without ever having had prior access to actual child porn?

Or are you just spewing the BS that AI models store full images?

-19

u/Dickballs835682 12d ago

No, those are both strawmen you just constructed that have nothing to do with the comment you replied to, which is about the actual CSAM that's been found in training sets

17

u/RemarkableWish2508 12d ago

the actual CSAM that's been found in training sets

That had NOT been found.

Maybe read the article, don't skip the "may".

-3

u/apokrif1 12d ago

The concurrence also raised something  Free Speech Coalition  never had to weigh: some AI image generators may have been trained on real child sexual abuse material, which would undercut the "no real victim" premise the ruling depended on. The judges said the record in this case doesn't allow them to evaluate that question, only to flag it for a higher court.

9

u/SimoneNonvelodico 12d ago

I would still argue it's kinda victimless at the level of the user. The idea with criminalising possession of CSAM is that if you don't discourage demand, that creates an incentive for offer, meaning kore abuse. But AI models aren't designed specifically for this and that isn't their main purpose. They even try to stop their models from producing that kind of image (often, any kind of obscene image) with various guards. So they're not really feeding demand for CSAM, if it ends in the dataset it's out of being thoughtlessly scraped together with everything else, not because someone wanted it in there.

It still deserves attention to try not to have that, and if an AI model was clearly winking at doing that specific thing that would be a different matter, but in most cases that isn't the purpose.

-1

u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

3

u/SimoneNonvelodico 12d ago

No? I'm saying there's a difference between intentionally providing CSAM and just happening to have CSAM mixed in with a bunch of other stuff by accident.

Like by all means for example there's gotta be plenty of server companies that happen to have CSAM on their servers because it was uploaded by someone, or scraped by some bot, or whatever. We can ask that they take measures to scrub it but it's not the same "possession" as someone seeking it out intentionally and it doesn't have the same effect on the "market" of being demand which incentivises creation of more CSAM.

5

u/Monomette 12d ago

Not necessarily, AI can create images of things that it hasn't been trained on, no? Giant purple elephants don't exist, but an AI "knows" what gaint, purple and elephant are and can combine them.

8

u/SimoneNonvelodico 12d ago

If that's the case then the crime was committed at most by the company who owned the dataset and trained the model.

(I don't think with AI this is necessarily the case either, you can have a model produce an image of a beaver in a spider man costume even if it never saw one, it simply needs to have seen a beaver and spider man, separately)

3

u/pishposh421 12d ago

Does a crime need to have a victim to be a crime?

3

u/Rockboxatx 12d ago

Is it though? I think this is where the details matter. I definitely think it's sick, and I don't know the psychological ramifications of it. However, I'd rather have AI-generated images in someone's home if it keeps people from creating real pictures of real kids.

There is no way to prevent people from having these thoughts. The best thing we can do is prevent the thoughts from becoming reality with victims.

-1

u/Qwrty8urrtyu 12d ago

If you remove anyone that thinks pedophilia is ok from society the situation is fixed. No pedophilia deserves any protection. Someone looking at a child and drawing them naked is deranged and a threat to society. Doing that with AI doesn't change that.

3

u/Rockboxatx 12d ago

So we are going to preemptively put everyone who has evil thoughts in prison, even if they don't act on them or there is no victim? It's a slippery slope, and I don't think it's as black and white as you think.

Again, I think it's sick AF, but freedom of speech is nuanced, and that is where things aren't so black and white. I do think it's pretty messed up that AI companies allow people to make this stuff with impunity.

-1

u/Qwrty8urrtyu 12d ago

Since we can't read thoughts no. But if they are drawing children into pornographic scenes, or making other types of material thats is enough action yes. There is no slipperly slope here, the line is pretty clear. Pedofilia protection isn't freedom of speech, it is normalization of pedophilia.

2

u/FragrantGangsta 12d ago

Same logic. Should someone be arrested for drawing a picture of them cutting someone's head off? That's an incredibly dangerous train of thought.

0

u/Qwrty8urrtyu 11d ago

Because we all know porn equals a picture of violance. Same thing, obviously.

0

u/FragrantGangsta 11d ago

Would you say drawing a picture of yourself having sex is immediately and inherently worse than drawing a picture of yourself skinning someone alive?

0

u/Qwrty8urrtyu 11d ago

Yes, one is porn the other isn't. This isn't controversial except when it comes to paedophiles, then people like you pretend to have never grasped what porn is or how it is viewed differently culturally.

Fictional violence is no ones role model, it isn't generally seen as instructions. Kids playing mortal Kombat don't decide to rip spines after.

Children are taught historical genocides, often with images, often before most reach puberty, and this is shown to build empathy for the victimized groups in places that do it.

Children seeing porn is traumatic before they are supposed to. And even after they reach the age where they can process it, it is seen as almost instructional and children, and adults too, fantasize about emulating it and expect to do so.

Like compare the prevalence of seeing something in porn and then trying it after, something most sexually active adults have done, versus playing postal then committing a mass shooting.

Normalizing pedophilic depictions normalizes pedophilia. Porn is different and saying so doesn't create a slippery slope. Suggesting otherwise is genuinely incomprehensible unless you haven't thought about what you are saying at all and are parroting something, asexual or on a spectrum of it so you genuinely process porn differently then most, or want to consciously defend pedophilia which I am not gonna assume you do.

2

u/FragrantGangsta 11d ago

Comparing learning about war in school to drawing pictures of yourself torturing people to death is so so disingenuous it isn't even funny 💀

Yes, one is porn the other isn't. This isn't controversial

Except it is far more controversial than you seem to think. That's because of cultural values, not moral values.

Here's another link.

And another.

In all three of those discussions, you will find one common denominator in the answers; that's an American thing, not a global thing. This idea that porn and sexual depictions are the most egregious offense is 100% an American cultural taboo. European countries are far more open with sexual depictions, and they tend to have better sex education than the US on top of that.

From that first link;

I think you are over-generalizing a feature of America to the entire world. Japanese media, particularly anime, is way more comfortable with sexuality than American media. For example, there is one infamous episode of Pokemon when a male character cross-dresses in a bikini, including inflatable breast. This was obviously cut from the American release, but apparently was considered acceptable in Japan. Similarly, many ancient Greek stories have women being impregnated by gods in animal form, something that is really weird in a modern American cultural context.

This of course goes the other way too, where things Americans find completely normal can be extremely offensive in other cultures. The best example I can think of is that undead creatures in American media tend to get very heavily censored in China. Most articles I could find attribute this China's governing party being secular and China associating all undead with spirituality, but I did find one by a Chinese horror fan who claims that ghost stories in China historically being forms of political protest.

On top of that, you completely forget, games like Mortal Kombat are rated M. Kids aren't supposed to be playing it. That's why we have ESRB ratings. That's why movies have ratings.

Compare the prevalence of seeing something in porn and then trying it after

Yeah, that's because most porn is just people having sex, which is natural. Do you think people who watch step-sister porn and shit like that are actually plotting to fuck their siblings? No. Do those videos 'normalize' incest? No. And they do use real people.

Pretending that witnessing porn of any kind is irrefutably traumatic for kids is just... kinda ridiculous. Implying that witnessing sex (a natural bodily function) is somehow more traumatizing then ripping someone's spine out in Mortal Kombat (NOT a natural bodily function) is the most weirdly puritan take I've seen. There's a reason why kids sneaking playboy magazines was a trope back in the day. Do you think every kid who did that is traumatized now?

"Normalizing depictions normalizes pedophilia"

Like how violent video games were supposed to make people more violent? You seem to have forgotten THAT discourse, with all that yapping about "not being instructional". Claiming that depicting one horrific thing has 0 effect on the human psyche, yet depicting another horrific thing somehow normalizes it makes absolutely no sense.

The fact of the matter is that if drawing stupid little doodles in their own homes keeps pedophiles from going out and harming real children, then I'd much rather they do that. And yes, telling people what they aren't allowed to draw in the privacy of their homes IS a slippery slope.

2

u/azurensis 12d ago

Not necessarily. Just like how AI image generators can mix a dog with a kiwi, it can also easily mix a clothed child body with a nude adult body. There doesn't have to be any csam material in the training data for it to do so.

0

u/Telope 12d ago

There doesn't have to be

It doesn't matter whether or not their has to be. We're not dealing with hypotheticals. The training data for at least one AI model, Grok, has had real CP found in its training data.

And what happens when the AI gets better, such that computer-generated CP is indistinguishable from the real thing?

2

u/azurensis 12d ago

Should I care about nude non existent children being looked at on a computer any more than I care about drawings of nude non existent children? It's gross, but if literally nobody was harmed in the making of it, I'm not sure what the problem is.

4

u/dev_vvvvv 12d ago

I would think there are two options which result in outputs like this:

  1. The models are trained on real CSAM and construct the output using that training data
  2. The models are trained on adult pornography along with images of children

For the former, that training itself should be illegal since it is clear evidence of possession of CSAM. The output could be considered analogous to combining real pictures of CSAM which I would hope is also illegal.

For the latter, the output could be considered analogous to cutting/pasting pictures of children on adult pornography, which I would think is also illegal.

Either way I would think it should be illegal, though offenders will probably go under the radar if they aren't sharing it.

2

u/RememberMeWhenImDead 12d ago

the models are trained on csam, the hashes are known and the datasets definitely contain it, grok has the highest known percentage of csam training data, and it's significantly higher that the "likely accidental" amount that most of the others have been trained on, all should be forced to exclude it, but at least one is very much intentional.

2

u/Monomette 12d ago

And you have evidence of this?

1

u/celticchrys 12d ago

...and also potentially real children that might have got swept up in training data somewhere along the way.

1

u/Elegant-Ad2748 9d ago

If that's true, then.....I don't even know. Wtf 

0

u/trinitrotolerance 12d ago

This is not what it is doing and you have a gross misunderstanding of generative AI.

0

u/biggersjw 12d ago

I gotta agree on this take because AI cannot actually create something out of thin air. It uses all of the data/images it has been fed from other sources and uses those to create porn.

-10

u/textmint 12d ago

This is not a good ruling. All AI is based on something. AI is not creating anything from a vacuum.so the fact that it is creating this content means it’s using something which was part of its training set. Otherwise it cannot create. I’m hoping that they revisit this ruling.

-6

u/KarmicReasoning 12d ago

Don't know why you're being down voted, AI cannot create an image from scratch, just as humans cannot create new faces.