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Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion I think the reason they raided the offices for CSAM would be there are laws on the books for CSAM and not for social manipulation. If people could be jailed for manipulation there would be no social media platforms, lobbyists, political campaign groups or advertisements. People are already being manipulated by AI.

On a related note given AI is just a tool and requires someone to tell it to make CSAM I think they will have to prove intent possibly by grabbing chat logs, emails and other internal communications but I know very little about French law or international law.

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hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation? Where would that end? could i be jailed if i post a review for a restaurant if you feel it manipulated you? or anyone stating an opinion could be construed as manipulation. that is beyond a slippery slope, that is an authoritarian nightmare.

So you think writing a review is somehow on the same magnitude as social media platforms with 300 million-3 billion users?

And how is that different from TV channels/media en large having laws to abide by? Slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery slopes..

The TV station thing, talking about the US here, only applies to broadcast TV and it is a condition of getting their a frequency allotment from the government.

No, i am not saying that it is the same. I am saying that it would start as "We are just going after the tech companies" but if you give the government an inch they will take a mile. They would take that and expand upon the hate speech stuff you are already see around the world as an excuse to arrest whoever they wanted.

I am a free market person, so i think these sites are providing something to the market that people like or they wouldn't be there. If you wanted to rein them in, fine but you have to be careful how you word stuff or it gets pretty scary pretty quickly.

Hate speech laws exist in most of Europe and they are not abused at all. And it's not like media wouldn't already have a bunch of laws applied to it, even in the US - e.g. libel and the like. Surely you can slippery slope with that as well, right?

And the free market only works if there is a well-defined market with proper laws that are upheld. Otherwise it's a running competition where Meta/X just shoot every other competitor at the start and drive to the goal with a car. This has been known by Adam Smith already - you can't be a "free market person" while being happy with these giga-corporations trampling on laws left and right.

> they are not abused at all

In Germany, support for Palestine is considered hate speech since it's antisemitic.

I believe the context I was proposing would be at the scale of world-wide manipulation. Rigging elections and such. There is a Netflix documentary called "The Great Hack" that gets into what I am discussing though from the perspective of social media algorithm. This only gets more effective when people are chatting with an AI bot that mimics a human and they think is their significant other that laughs at all their jokes and strokes their ego.

I think your interpretation would be more along the line of making 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid's Tale a reality.

Yeah i get that. I just hesitate to give any government even more power than they do now to silence people, which they would definitely use any law like that to do.

I will have to check that out, it sounds interesting. It was also pretty obvious how all the social media companies pushed the same narrative through COVID.

I don't like how these social networks and the media try to manipulate things but I don't think giving the government even more power will fix anything. It will probably make it worse. I think even if you had those laws on the books, you would still get manipulation through selective enforcement.

I think the only solution is education and individuals saying no to these platforms' and their algorithmic feeds. I think we are already seeing a growing movement towards people either not using social media or using it way less than they did previously. I know for me personally, I use X but only follow tech people i like and only look at the "following" tab. It is a much better experience than the "for you" tab

> hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation?

Its the usual deal from the that crowd:

- when the left does it, it’s just them using their civil liberties

- when the right does it, its illegal manipulation, election interference, fascism and/or Russian disinformation.

It’s the same crowd which keeps using the phrase “our democracy”.

Behaviour like this really makes me wonder who they are, and who they deem not worthy to be included in “their” democracy.

Few laws have bright lines. Can I be jailed for murder if I crash a car into someone? It depends greatly upon the specific circumstances.

It's broader and mentioned in the article:

>French authorities opened their investigation after reports from a French lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms on X likely distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system. It expanded after Grok generated posts that allegedly denied the Holocaust, a crime in France, and spread sexually explicit deepfakes, the statement said.

Broader still.

and fraudulent data extraction by an organised group.

I had to make a choice to not even use Grok (I wasn't overly interested in the first place, but wanted to review how it might compare to the other tools), because even just the Explore option shows photos and videos of CSAM, CSAM-adjacent, and other "problematic" things in a photorealistic manner (such as implied bestiality).

Looking at the prompts below some of those image shows that even now, there's almost zero effort at Grok to filter prompts that are blatantly looking to create problematic material. People aren't being sneaky and smart and wordsmithing subtle cues to try to bypass content filtering, they're often saying "create this" bluntly and directly, and Grok is happily obliging.

Given America passed PAFACA (intended to ban TikTok, which Trump instead put in hands of his friends), I would think Europe would also have a similar law. Is that not the case?

Are you talking about this [1]? I don't know the answer to your question whether or not the EU has the same policy. That is talking about control by a foreign adversary.

I think that would delve into whether or not the USA would be considered a foreign adversary to France. I was under the impression we were allies since like the 1800s or so despite some little tiffs now and again.

[1] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521

EngineerUSA needs to vastly change his tone to avoid being flagged. I vouched it because it's broadly true but the wording could be a LOT better.

> I think the reason they raided the offices for CSAM

Sigh. The French raid statement makes no mention of CSAM.

What does it say? I can't read French

Going from the BBC:

Among potential crimes it said it would investigate were complicity in possession or organised distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature, infringement of people's image rights with sexual deepfakes and fraudulent data extraction by an organised group.

Distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature sounds like child porn to me. CSAM is a woker word for child porn.

> Distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature sounds like child porn to me.

To me too.

> CSAM is a woker word for child porn.

Indeed some people would like it diluted thus. But it generally remains (an initialism not word) for something quite distinct - about abuse rather than just porn.

CSAM is not a woker word. It was created to be more explicit as the original term was CP which stood for child pornography but there are too many common things that when abbreviated are "CP".

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