25 arrested in major crackdown of AI-generated child abuse images network
25 arrested in major crackdown of AI-generated child abuse images network
www.politico.eu
25 arrested in major crackdown of AI-generated child abuse images network – POLITICO
Police in 20 countries have taken down a network that distributed images of child sexual abuse entirely generated by artificial intelligence.
The operation – which spanned European countries including the United Kingdom as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand – is "one of the first cases" involving AI-generated images of child sexual abuse material, Europe's law enforcement agency Europol, which supported the action, said in a press release.
Danish authorities led an operation, which resulted in 25 arrests, 33 house searches and 173 devices being seized.
You can't... generate... abuse.
No more than you can generate murder.
The entire point of saying "child abuse images" is to distinguish evidence of rape from, just, drawings.
If you want drawings of this to also be illegal, fine, great, say that. But stop letting people use the language of actual real-world molestation of living human children, when describing some shit a guy made up alone.
How did they train the model? I'd say it's just as problematic if the generator was trained using CSAM.
How can anyone believe these models have a big pile of hyper-illegal go-to-jail images, labeled specifically for word-to-image training?
This technology combines concepts. That's why it's a big fucking deal. Generating a thousand images of Darth Shrektopus riding a horse on the moon does not imply a single example of exactly that. The model knows what children are - the model knows what pornography is. It can satisfy those unrelated concepts, simultaneously.
Theoretically you should be able to generate it by cobbling together legal images.
But given the massive volume of scraped data, they've also ended up with actual CSAM in their training data. I recall seeing articles about them having to identify and remove it, but I'm definitely not adding that search to my history.
Some what's agree, but imagine models are able to combine concepts to generate semi-novel images. You wouldn't need specifically child porn to generate child porn. Images of children, and images of porn, can be combine to create child porn.
But considering how indiscriminate AI crawlers have been, you can bet the training data does contain lots of it...
Even then it's not "just as problematic" because unlike the production of the training data itself, the images it outputs don't require any further abuse. It's definitely a moral gray zone but I don't think anyone would seriously argue that producing AI pictures of this sort is just as bad as taking pictures of actual abuse.
However, what I believe to be the logic here is that these people have likely trained their own models based on their own database of images, so while the authorities are going after people based on AI pictures, it's not the AI pictures that they're really after.