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Comment by leobg | Hacker News Reader

So I guess in the 90s they would’ve sued Adobe for not putting spyware into Photoshop?

If you believe in democracy, and the rule of law, and citizenship, then the responsibility obviously lies with people who create and publish pictures, not the makers of tools.

Think of it. You can use a phone camera to produce illegal pictures. What kind of a world would we live in if Apple was required to run an AI filter on your pics to determine whether they comply with the laws?

A different question is if X actually hosts generated pictures that are illegal in the UK. In that case, X acts as a publisher, and you can sue them along with the creator for removal.

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Photoshop does have (since the late 1990s or so) algorithms to detect and prevent editing images of currency.

The power of the AI tools is so great in comparison to a non-AI image editor that there's probably debate on who -- the user, or the operator of the AI -- is creating the image.

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

> The power of the AI tools is so great in comparison to a non-AI image editor that there's probably debate on who -- the user, or the operator of the AI -- is creating the image.

Compute power is irrelevent. What's relevant in law is who is causing the generation, and that's obviously the operator.

Sorry. Correction: What's relevant in law is who is causing the generation, and that's obviously the user.

There is a big difference between running spyware on things running locally, and monitoring how people use a service running on your own computers. The former means you have to exfiltrate data, the latter is monitoring data you already have.

Photoshop in the 90s was the former, Grok is the latter.

> A different question is if X actually hosts generated pictures that are illegal in the UK.

If the answer was Yes, these Govt. complaints would claim so. They don't.

The Govt's problem is imagery it calls 'barely legal'. I.e. "legal but we wish it wasn't." https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/03/uk-pornograp...

Apple does run software for detecting CSAM on pictures users store to the cloud.

That's to ensure Apple compliance, not user compliance.

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