Fitzgerald’s is a rare case where an official employed by the state’s top law enforcement and legal office has been accused of making and distributing AI CSAM, although some cops have been arrested for the crime. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania cop was arrested for making AI porn from photos on driver’s licenses, and more recently in Korea, a police officer was arrested for making AI porn, including CSAM, The Korea Times reported.
In New Jersey, the deputy attorney general has been charged with possession of CSAM, dissemination of photos or film of CSAM, and “criminal use of a communication facility,” detectives said.
The companies that provide the bots should also be punished somehow. It’s clear they either don’t have any safeguards in place or the ones they have are insufficient.
100%
Right now the only real accountability for these companies is when they get sued or put on blast enough on social media. I think that will eventually change, but it won’t happen due to the legal system in the US. It’ll happen because some random country put their foot down internationally.
Right, so punish every company that make a product.
After all a company who make knives do not put any safeguards in place to avoid one of their knife if used to kill someone.
Or a telcom do not put any safeguards in place to avoid someone use a phone line to harass someonelse.
Or a car company since they do not put any safeguard in place to avoid that one of their car is used for a robbery.
Or [any company] since they do not put any safeguard in place to avoid that one of their product is used to [commit a crime]
Sounds better ?
All of this can be done on a graphics card from 3 generations ago locally though - it’s like Photoshop you know, people can use Photoshop to make revenge porn but Photoshop isn’t illegal, using it to make revenge porn is illegal.
It’s only illegal if the law is actually enforced. Thankfully, due to MeToo, revenge porn gets way more of a response from the law than it did.
That is not currently the case in any meaningful way with image generators being used to make CSAM, which is why it’s important that the companies themselves be held liable. Grok still lets you do this if you buy a sub. Copilot lets you do this and Microsoft knows it, per recent leaks from their prompt reviewers. Meta runs ads for CSAM on Facebook.
In this case, multiple tech companies are knowingly enabling these crimes without a peep from the law to stop them. (At least in the US.)
They just busted a senior law enforcement official for this btw we are commenting on a post about an article about it. I doubt they were using a frontier API
I don’t think you’re understanding what they’re trying to say.
You don’t need to use Grok/Claude/Copilot/Gemini/ChatGPT/etc. at all. Hugging Face currently lists 111,953 text-to-image and 2,893 text-to-video models available.
You can run an image or video generator model at home on your own hardware you currently have. This technology doesn’t require a $10k rig to run. The massive data centers are only necessary for the Software as a Service providers like ChatGPT to operate their systems as fast as possible to tens of thousands of users, with dozens of agents processing multiple steps and reasoning to accomplish a task. One person making one image doesn’t need much.
While the SaaS options definitely need to get better at detecting and blocking usage like CSAM… those services are by no means required. You can do this on any gaming system made in the last 5 years easily, and older if you’re willing to wait longer for the result.
Thank you for the added info, and I totally get that there are workarounds for more diligent predators.
That doesn’t change the fact that the frontier AI companies knowingly making this easy and accessible for sick people is still unacceptable and real accountability is necessary.
Okay, but can we not get local models banned, please? This is what openai and company are gonna use to say we have to pay them if we want AI.
Banning open source is never a useful option
For real? Next you’re gonna tell me Adobe is at fault too for letting you xray nude people (modifying existing colour channels in existing images to see through clothes), and knife manufacturers are at fault for you stabbing everyone
There’s a difference.
Both of those scenarios are meaningfully regulated under the law. (Specifically revenge porn, misusing a person’s likeness, and stabbing people.) Also, if you don’t think providing someone with a weapon in the knowledge that they intend to do harm to a person with it will get you into some serious legal shit, you would be incorrect.
CSAM via AI, currently, is not and major tech firms are flouting that fact for profit. (Or, more accurately, in a desperate grasp for any profit, since AI isn’t profitable.) Absent meaningful regulation it is imperative to hold the companies knowingly creating the dangerous product accountable legally and financially. We know they can program their models not to do this because several of them don’t have demonstrated it.
Also, thanks to leakers, we know 100% that the companies doing this are aware of what they’re doing. I made a whole video about it.
CSAM absolutely is… What a wild thing to say
CSAM, yes.
CSAM via AI, no.
And the word you’re ignoring here is ‘meaningfully’, which is pretty important.
https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2024/PSA240329
Respectfully please stfu, you’re spreading incredibly harmful misinformation. The article we’re commenting on is even about the arrest of a CSAM generator??
Is this meaningfully enforced though? I agree that accuracy about what the law says is important, but laws are being unevenly enforced, making them, by definition, privileges. Just because the government calls it a law doesn’t mean it functions as one in the practical sense, which is what matters most.
Reading the article we are commenting on about the arrest of a CSAM generator
Harmful about law, useful about facts of life one like that generating a picture doesn’t involve abusing a child, so it’s not child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Yes, I do feel threatened by people who think it’s just to punish consuming generated material. That’s because of pretty “normal” porn. Is watching (and spreading) something about BSDM similar to sexual abuse materials (about adults)? Is generated porn sexual exploitation material, if porn is in some future outlawed as such with real punishments? Is it, if the dataset is polluted with cases of slavery and rape? If it’s not, then is it legal in such a potential future?
If you do that to CSAM, try applying the same logic to normal porn and plenty of other things which are for some people sick, but legal because nobody suffers.
The problem with generated CSAM is that it normalizes sick things, well, that’s still a crime an order of magnitude less than spreading a record of real rape. Seems obvious.
Again, you’re ignoring important context.
That’s okay though. Have a nice Sunday.