Holy hyperbole, batman! Threaten to overwhelm the internet!
Someone's hungry for clicks today, eh, The Guardian?
AI-generated CSAM is illegal under the Protection of Children Act 1978, which criminalises the taking, distribution and possession of an “indecent photograph or pseudo photograph” of a child.
Aaaand there you go. This is nothing new. There have been laws on the books for decades to help deal with this exact problem. Someone just slapped "AI" on the story to gin up worry.
I agree with your assessment wholly. There was a case in the US (don't recall the details) maybe 15 years ago or so where the "cp" was actually drawings of the Simpson's children nude. Judge held that it didn't matter if it was real or fake. This sort of thing isn't new.
I only came to comment that I would not have predicted that AI would be used this way, but am not at all surprised by it.
Didn't the Simpson's movie from 16 years ago get away with showing Bart's genitals? Are we still leaning on the "know it when I see it" definition of sexually explicit material?
"Flooding the internet" - my ass. With 3000 pictures. Which is absolutely nothing in todays world. Maybe flooding some pedophile niches in the darkest corners of the internet, maybe replacing pictures of real abuse there. Makes you wonder where this "Internet Watch Foundation" actually hangs out. And what they smoke when they write their press releases.
"Overwhelm the internet" makes it sound like it's going to be flooding every website, but I don't see why they wouldn't deal with it the way they already do. A lot of these orgs try to be overly alarmist on purpose to attract political attention to their causes, but it creates distrust with people who aren't necessarily "in" on the org's operations and strategy.
"Threaten to overwhelm", they found 3,000 images. By internet standards that's next to nothing. This is already illegal and it's fairly easy to filter out(or it would be if companies could train on the material legally).
Not really. Image sets tend to have hundreds of photos in different poses. A lot of the sets that would show up on 4chan forever ago included a thumbnail image showing just how many were in the archive.
Does it? Or is it just bonus content for pedophiles? Just because they’re now getting thing B doesn’t mean they’re not also still getting thing A. In fact, there’s nothing to suggest that this wouldn’t just make things worse. What’s to stop them from simply using it like a sandbox to test out shit they’ve been too timid to do themselves in real life? Little allowances like this are actually a pretty common way for people to build up to committing bolder crimes. It’s a textbook pattern for serial killers, what’s to say it wouldn’t serve the same purpose here?
But hey, if it does result in less child abuse material being created, that’s great. But there’s no evidence that this is actually how it will play out. It’s just wishful thinking because people want to give generative AI the benefit of the doubt that it is a net positive for society.
Anyway, rant over. You might be able to tell that I have strong feelings about benefit and dangers of these tools.
I’m guessing they could easily support this with a simple premise: Examine a legal fetish, which AI can generate images of, and ask people who generate those images if their consumption of real images have fallen as a result. Also check if actual real life participation in it has been reduced due to the ability to generate the scenarios privately.
It will be skewed if the fetish is legal, since participating won’t land you in jail. But there may be some out there that present other risks besides legal ones to help with that.
Also the models were trained on real images, every image these tools create are directly related to the rape of thousands or even tens of thousands of children.
Real or not these images came from real children that were raped in the worst ways imaginable
Just as a general rule, when we develop a technology, someone in our society (typically rich people and limit-testers; also teens) will try doing the worst most abominable deeds with this tech until we learn there is a general good reason not to do that thing.
Hence, defective clones of aristocrats, deepfakes of school peers and AI child porn. This is just the beginning.
Fun Fact: NGOs have long been using 3D printers to create prototypes by which to smith Soviet-era guns to arm villages against regional warlords. As desktop manufacturing gets closer and closer to the home office, ad hoc arms production will be an inevitability.
The “worst nightmares” about artificial intelligence-generated child sexual abuse images are coming true and threaten to overwhelm the internet, a safety watchdog has warned.
Other examples of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) included using AI tools to “nudify” pictures of clothed children found online.
Its latest findings were based on a month-long investigation into a child abuse forum on the dark web, a section of the internet that can only be accessed with a specialist browser.
The IWF said the vast majority of the illegal material it had found was in breach of the Protection of Children Act, with more than one in five of those images classified as category A, the most serious kind of content, which can depict rape and sexual torture.
Stability AI, the UK company behind Stable Diffusion, has said it “prohibits any misuse for illegal or immoral purposes across our platforms, and our policies are clear that this includes CSAM”.
The government has said AI-generated CSAM will be covered by the online safety bill, due to become law imminently, and that social media companies would be required to prevent it from appearing on their platforms.
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There is a potential for proliferation of CSAM generated by AI. While the big AI generators are centralized and kept clear of most bad stuff, eventually unrestricted versions will become widespread.
We already have deepfake porn of popular actresses, which I think is already harmful. There's also been sexually explicit deepfakes made of preteen and young teenage girls in Spain, and I think that's the first of many similar incidents to come.
I can't think of a way to prevent this happening without destroying major potential in AI.
Full steam ahead on AI bullshit though, no brakes on the freight train of potentially society-shattering fuckery because there could be profits involved.
Ah, so you’re just going to ignore how vastly different the rollout of all those technologies was compared to the breakneck pace that generative AI tools are being made available to essentially everyone on earth with almost no oversight? I get that ignoring absolutely all the details makes it seem like my skepticism is unreasonable, but it’s a little dishonest, no?
Just to remind anyone who thinks AI generated child porn is okay or not as bad as "real" child porn or the same as animated child porn.
These models were trained on real images, every image these tools create are directly related to the rape of thousands or even tens of thousands of children.
Real or not these images came from real children that were raped in the worst ways imaginable