It will be interesting to see if/how this will modify their argument "for the children". It is a nuanced discussion.
Is it a crime ? Why / why not ?
Is there a victim, is there harm being done ?
Needless to say I personally find it appalling.
Is it a crime ? Why / why not ?
Is there a victim, is there harm being done ?
Needless to say I personally find it appalling.
Decades of megacorporation propaganda have paid off, and a fair portion of gen-z/y/x is hypervigilant about use without permission, even if the use is transformative and doesn't displace the original work. Their misguided concerns will play into the hands of the politicians seeking more control.
And it will do very little to prevent the spread of AI "CSAM"[1]. What are they going to do, regulate GPUs or any AI training software?
[1] Or any of the other concerns of today, like voice cloning or mimicry of personal likeness, like what just happened with Taylor Swift. The cat's out of the bag for images; OSS voice cloning is roughly at elevenlabs' quality, and it'll be surprising if there aren't, very soon, easy-to-use interfaces for voice cloning and tts.
So the AI images likely are as well because the training set would contain innocent child images that helped generate them.
Training data may also unknowingly contain actual child porn. If so then any naked/sex images derive partially from child porn. And many jurisdictions have "strict liability" laws...
Find one single illegal image in the training set and the entire model would be tainted. And how many may have slipped through human review? [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201109024622/https://www.nytim...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbo...
Obviously the powers that be will try to use this at their advantage, trying to tighten a bit control over population, such as rendering AI models illegal, except a selected blessed few (read megacorp. ones)
IMO the general response shouldn't be just trying to defend the freedom position for freedom sake, but to find viable alternative solutions that don't mine the freedom of the population.
For example... we could try to use AI to detect if the images are AI generated or not :) And police should have the means to use AI, maybe given for free by the megacorp that benefit the most from AI
The inability to extract a training set from a model adds a lot of ethical ambiguity to generative images, as does the ambiguity in who’s responsible for what the models produce. I think it would be utterly ridiculous to say that someone training models with CSAM has no culpability in what it produces— only for possessing the CSAM to begin with— but I also think it would be utterly ridiculous to hold people accountable for everything their models produce, given their flexibility. What about writing a prompt that generates CSAM inadvertently? What if nobody involved intended to make CSAM but through some algorithmic shenanigans the prompt produced it? Should we legally require some amount of model testing before it’s used? Would the tester be violating the law if it failed the test, even if they reviewed every single image in the training set? Who’s responsible for deliberately poisoned models with secret key terms, or malicious data that is not CSAM but can trick the model into creating it? Would some entity like Midjourney that not only provides a model, but a complete appliance for this process be responsible for the images it produced? Does it matter if they authored the models they use? What if users can upload or train their own models? How does automation ethically affect these considerations?
Someone with legal expertise obviously would have a better grasp of these situations than I do, but I do know we’ve got a lot of growing pains en route with this technology.
As far as I know it's still OK to make images of murder and torture.
If the training data contained sexual images of consenting adults and legal images of children, many intelligent models could interpolate between the two.
To be clear, I find child sexual abuse appalling, but maybe synthetic images would keep some people "satisfied" and leave the real children alone?
Besides, if it worked like that, training on anything under copyright would have a similar effect. These models have a bigger problem if they get “tainted” by a tainted training source. (Fingers crossed they do! But I doubt it)
But "CSAM" also includes "character looks under 18" even if they look fully developed, which an AI model could do without training on actual CSAM.
Whether that makes the model illegal is a separate question. Is a LLM illegal if a clever prompt can get it to output a copyrighted poem? Is a human illegal if they can draw "CSAM"?
While one might argue there’s no immediate victim, the problem is a kind of sexual hedonistic adaption,
At Gay saunas and sex shops it’s well known that playing porn where people don’t wear condoms greatly increases the incidence of condomless sex on the site, and playing porn with condom users greatly increases condom use. There are some saunas that ONLY play porn with condom users for this reason.
I imagine these synthetic images would do the same thing. They are fueling a dangerous fire. Soon images won’t be enough and given they’re now desensitised though frequent exposure, it’s easier to make the leap to reality
If you’re a chocolate addict, having a hobby of smelling chocolate is a really dumb idea.