UAE-based Falcon AI NSFW classifier among top global open-source models (2025) | Hacker News Reader

UAE-based Falcon AI NSFW classifier among top global open-source models (2025)

middleeastainews.com

23 pointsinstagraham25 comments

Coincidentally I was trying this out yesterday as a potential option for automated porn filtering for the imageboard that I administrate. It is very lightweight which is good but the performance is not great. Some weird false positives and it does a bad job with flat chested women which is very concerning to me because it leads me to think it won’t be effective against CSAM.

it is amusing that a model from a country that has banned porn would ever be developed. Wouldn't there be hurdles for them to access "data" at every stage?

(I know they must have used a VPN for training but it does seem like an added hoop. OFC the UAE's block is also not particularly thorough.)

You'd assume such models would do better in a laissez-faire nsfw environment than in a walled garden of relatively-less sin.

It's for research purposes :wink: :wink:

It's a story as old as time so I'm frankly less amused by it. The old school censors always saw every "data" that was taboo under the sun prior to censoring it for public consumption.

There are plenty western CSAM detection models

Can you suggest a good one?

I guess CSAM detection will remain hard as the training data raises so many ethical concerns.

I wonder if there's a way in which we can forward-hash sensitive material like CSAM and train a classifier that only consumes the 'hashed' version of the material for training and detection.

I believe this is how many CSAM classifiers work. There isn't a simple legal avenue to host CSAM for classifier training, for good reason.

This is already done, there's hashed indexes of known CSAM and you can apply vector steering to the latent space to shift detections to trigger on CSAM material. You can also use two detectors for age estimation and a separate one for nudity and use them in combination.

Very naive approach but wouldn't training a model on a few specific buckets like "someone is naked", "image is explicit" and "there is a child" in the picture, would do the job without having to train explicitely on CSAM? If the model returns both a high probability of "there is a child" and a high probability of any other bucket than this image is classified as CSAM. It'd be high recall,low precision but one would be on a rather safe side.

Share the training data :)

It's just porn I downloaded from Reddit. I don't know if you're aware but there's lots of it and it's free.

Always two sides to classification. Finding and Banning. It's tempting to ask if this is one, the other or both by the same people.

Planet-scale nude-selfie extenuation racket?

How many people download classifiers?

The number of downloads really doesn't seem like a good way to measure the quality of a bit of work. One download could be deployed on a bit website and classify billions of users images.

Smells like someone is botting the download numbers to get a press release....

> UAE AI model tops 50 million monthly downloads

So in a bit more than a year, 10% of the planet has downloaded a NSFW classifier?

I mean: in the end there are only 8 billion people on earth, which projects do, all added up, need to download one NSFW classifier 600 million times a year?

Something something something makes me think there are inefficiencies at play here.

Depends, if every time a project redeploys it redownloads all external resources from their respective CDNs, do you consider that to be inefficient? What if it’s part of a service that runs on thousands of instances to keep up with the volume of user generate content?

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