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AI-created child sexual abuse images ‘threaten to overwhelm internet’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/25/ai-created-child-sexual-abuse-images-threaten-overwhelm-internet?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Internet Watch Foundation finds 3,000 AI-made abuse images breaking UK law

AI-created child sexual abuse images ‘threaten to overwhelm internet’::Internet Watch Foundation finds 3,000 AI-made abuse images breaking UK law

59 comments

RotaryKeyboard

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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.

Bell

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They are trying to gather support for the new invasions into your privacy that are required "to save the poor children"

Eezyville

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Those poor AI children!

stolid_agnostic

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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.

there1snospoon

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would not have predicted

You must not have been on the internet for very long

stolid_agnostic

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Probably longer than most people but I often make the mistake of believing that humans tend to strive for good in spite of everything that indicates otherwise.

there1snospoon

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Some do. Some don’t. There will always be bad actors.

Stovetop

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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?

stolid_agnostic

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They do it in Dragon Ball as well. I think the point is that if it's just passing nudity (i.e. a child being a child), then it's not sexual.

Cypher

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The judge was later found to be hosting CP on his personal website, of a very similar nature.

baked_tea

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What the heeeell is this true?

scottywh

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That was Australia, not the US.

Look under Australia in the following Wikipedia page.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors

Clent

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We were all worrying AI was going to murder us to save us from ourselves; turns out it's going to do it by literally burying us in CASM.

Asimov was wrong!

Treczoks

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"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.

banneryear1868

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"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.

MTK

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By dark web pedophilia sites standards, I suspect 3000 unique images is actually a lot.

tsz

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Based on the "Ai art" I've seen, they aren't that unique...

BetaDoggo_

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"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).

MTK

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By dark web pedophilia sites standards, I suspect 3000 unique images is actually a lot.

Rouxibeau

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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.

EatYouWell

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Honestly, even though I find the idea abhorrent, if it prevents actual children from being abused...

I mean, the content is going to be generated one way or another.

Plopp

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But the poor algorithms that are forced to generate the content!

HeavyDogFeet

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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.

Igloojoe

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Your argument sounds very similar to when people argue that video games promote violence and criminal activity.

HeavyDogFeet

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That quite a stretch. For a start, playing video games isn’t illegal. Generating child porn is. Graduating from something innocent to something criminal is very different to starting off at one of the more heinous crimes in modern society and then continuing to do different variations of that same crime.

hahattpro

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Yeah, you play Teris at kid, then you become series killer with a brick in adult.

Yikep

burliman

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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.

Heavybell

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Where does the fact some people will happily jerk it exclusively to anime titty come into this, I wonder?

Brahminman

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It doesn't? They're a fucking edge case and if you only jerk it to anime then nobody will ever be harmed in the production of the port you watch, so nobody should care or read too much into it

MTK

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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

Bye

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I don’t think that’s the case

MTK

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Why not?

Bye

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You don’t need the exact content you want in order to train a model (Lora) for SD. If you train on naked adults, and clothed kids, it can make some gross shit. And there are a lot more of those safe pictures out there to use for training. I’d bet my left leg that these models were trained that way.

MTK

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Why? If these people have access to these images why would you bet that they don't use them?

There are dark web sites that have huge sets of CSAM, why would these people not use that? What are you betting on? Their morals?

Luisp

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I miss when nfts were the bad thing everyone hated

uriel238

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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.

ouRKaoS

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As desktop manufacturing gets closer and closer to the home office, ad hoc arms production wilk be an inevitability.

Do a quick Google for "FGC-9“

The future is now, old man!

uriel238

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FGC-9

TIL!

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 561 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

hahattpro

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So, this is where lolicon and shotaco live. Look optimistic, it is better for AI to endure the abuse rather than real human victim.

HeavyDogFeet

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Sure, except there’s nothing to suggest that this stuff would reduce the number of real humans being abused.

bit_thanos

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I wonder who got all those images the algorithm got trained on?

Mango

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Didn't people make the same fuss about Photoshop?

bloopernova

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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.

HeavyDogFeet

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Full steam ahead on AI bullshit though, no brakes on the freight train of potentially society-shattering fuckery because there could be profits involved.

yetAnotherUser

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potentially society-shattering fuckery

Clearly cameras, screens and the internet shouldn't have been invented. After all - they facilitate the creation and spread of CSAM!

HeavyDogFeet

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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?

yetAnotherUser

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I don't see how AI will potentially shatter society. You can't prevent AI models from being misused any more than you can prevent the internet from being misused.

The biggest danger of AI is the capability of spreading orchestrated misinformation. Since this is mostly done by state actors nothing can be done against it. I'm not opposed to AI regulation, it's just that generating images or text is not what's worrying about AI.

HeavyDogFeet

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I didn’t say image or text generation specifically is what would be society-shattering. There are lots of concerning aspects of these tool, and combined with the pace they’re being developed, its pretty clear that we’re not really prepared for the damage these can cause.

MTK

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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

DrDickHandler

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Not necessarily true.

Luisp

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But it is true, what's up with these creep comments defending a fucking child porn generation machine.

MTK

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Care to explain or do you just like to say things?

dabu

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To simplify:

AI parses images of adults having sex
AI parses images of minors
AI can generate an image of minors doing adult stuff

If you want to generate an image of a Lion in a tuxedo it didn't necessary need to parse images of lions in a tuxedo.

MTK

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You are talking about technicalities. For a model to be as good as possible you train on the most accurate data.

It is true that you can take SD, modify it to ignore moral values and then ask for CSAM but if you for example have a bunch of real CSAM and you train it on that data it would be much much better at generating believable CSAM. Which is what these criminals do...

Rouxibeau

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Bold statement from someone who is literally just saying things and posted nothing to validate their claims.

MTK

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I work with LLMs, SD and Threat Intelligence so I have some professional knowledge on the subject.

Rouxibeau

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That fails to rise to the level of verification. The expert witness must convince the jury that they are in fact an expert.

MTK

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Dude this isn't a court room, I said what I said and you can decide to ignore it if you want to.